But if somebody tells me a grand total of 13 different backup-generators dotted around the site and five battery-backups might all simultaneously fail due to various reasons he would have an extreremly hard time convincing me.
Replace "dotted around the site" with "all the in the same basement". And the depletion of all battery backups again was not independent, with a direct causual link both to the upstream generator failure, as well as the disruption to roads and infrastructure which delayed the arrival of additional resources.
http://www.blog.voximate.com/blog/article/1058/failover-backup-systems-redundant/ "The risk analysis may calculate the risk of each backup generator failing and then estimate the risk of all of them failing simultaneously by multiplying each generator’s risk of failure together, concluding that the risk of them all failing simultaneously is statistically very, very low. However, such an analysis assumes that the backup generators are all independent systems. As this crisis has demonstrated, the backup generators were NOT independent of each other. Because they were all in the same coast-side, sea level location, they all shared the common vulnerability of being shut down simultaneously by the same tsunami. Therefore, the actual risk of them all failing simultaneously due to a tsunami was equal to the risk of a single one of them failing due to a tsunami. Since all thirteen backup generators in actual fact failed when hit by this tsunami, the risk that each backup generator would fail when hit by a tsunami of this size appears to have been 100%."
since most of the subjects have been children with Sickle Cell and other types of anemia).
Huh. Now that makes a lot of sense as far as recruiting goes. I was wondering how they found people willing to undergo the risk of an partial-match bone-marrow transplant (and how to justify it to an ERB) in addition to their solid organ transplant.
Sounds too good to be true, and no evidence to support it. Recipe for a scam.
It's getting major buzz in the research community since the group presented preliminary results last year. Science magazine (about as legit as it gets) even titled their write-up "The Quest for Transplantation Tolerance: Have We Finally Sipped from the Cup?", as it truly is considered a holy grail of immunology.
I guess I thought that was common? Her donor was unrelated, but had a 10/10 match on HLA. That might be the magic. This study lists it working for a HLA mismatched recipient.
None of the 8 trial participants was a perfect match, ranging from 5/6 down to 1/6 (the article I have access to only lists the */6 system) with 4 organs coming from unrelated donors (the failed transplant case was actually a 3/6 related donor). Also, your daughter's very young age at transplant was a plus.
China was basically in a civil war at the beginning of WWII.
Not just at the beginning, but during WWII as well. Chiang-Kai Shek was a staunch anti-Communist, and believed (imho, correctly) the CCP to be as much of a long-term threat as the Japanese. The western powers put him under intense pressure to halt his campaign against the CCP and make an alliance against the Japanese (even then, he only did so after the Xi'an incident). Many historians believe it was the Japanese invasion and ensuing interruption in the civil war that allowed the communists to re-group (in the early stages of the conflict, the KMT very much had the upper hand) and attain eventual victory.
There are a number of inducible suicide genes (for instance, the HSV1-TK gene, inducible with Acyclovir) that have been developed for this very purpose. I believe the group at U. Penn mentioned that they would like to incorporate such a feature -- but as a long-term possibility; no such "kill switch" is being used in their current treatments.
Cpt. Picard: "This is Captain Picard of the U.S.S. Minivan. Stardate 1231.4. Our voyage to the Walmart parking lot has thus far been uneventful. According to our orders, we are to rendevouz with Federation shoppers at--"
As far as I know, there is nothing specific you can eat that is proven to boost your metabolism.
Nonsense. A dose of something like, say, 2,4-Dinitrophenol will absolutely increase your metabolic rate. Quite dramatically, and potentially to the point of lethal hyperthermia. On a side note, given DNP's effect on muscular intracellular Ca++ levels, I suspect it could have a demethylating effect similar to that obtained with caffeine used.
I remain baffled at how companies like Wizards of the Coast think it's acceptable to charge as much for online versions of stuff as they do for the real items (example here is MTG cards).
WoTC attempted to answer this by allowing MTG:Online players to trade a completed set of online cards for their real physical equivalents (originally for no extra cost, although they have since started tacking on a redemption fee). So in theory you could arbitrage the real and virtual versions.
"...There are simple tricks that are almost never noticed till a very high technology is attained. For instance, quantum torsion antennas can be built from silver and cobalt steel arrays, if the geometry is correct. Unfortunately, finding the proper geometry involves lots of theory and the ability to solve some large partial differential equations. There are many Slow Zoners who never discover the principle."
I wonder if its effectiveness differs with the language being spoken. Do faster-spoken languages become more stressful and difficult to continue with than slower-spoken ones?
Well, among languages, Japanese has an especially low information/syllable density (and thus is spoken rapidly). In comparison, languages such as Vietnamese, English and Mandarin Chinese have very high information densities, resulting in lower syllables-per-minute spoken.
My cynical interpretation is that Monsanto failed to make sufficiently generous offers for technology transfer. In which case the ban will last until Chinese laboratories make sufficient advances to field their own GM crops.
What I don't get is what this device is intended to be useful for if it's only able to sequence 150 million b.p. before wearing out. The article mentions that this is smaller than some human chromosomes, but unless they factored the necessary redundancy into that figure, it's not going to go very far.
Seeing as how this device uses a protein-based pore complex, I'm not surprised by the limited lifespan. Apparently, they offer a large array of pores to get the ensemble of fragments needed to assemble a complete sequence.
An invisible cloud of spores on an orbital trajectory that intersects with your planet. Being extremely tiny, the large surface area to mass ratio results in terminal velocities too low to burn up on re-entry. A few months later, your planet's population collapses.
Growing in-vitro meat is essentially the same business as manufacturing advanced bio-pharmaceuticals -- you have the same issues of running a bioreactor with strict sterility requirements, complex growing media, and other expensive criteria.
Even if technological developments were able to drive the cost of doing mammalian cell culture to a fraction of its current price, you would still be an absolute fool to use your capacity to produce a low-priced commodity, compared with the high-margin drug products that you could instead be making.
Retention time in 2003-time-frame flash is tens of years. Retention time for the latest 25nm flash is measured at one year.
Please tell me you're kidding -- only one year?
The flash retention problem is going to turn out as bad as the Capacitor Plague. A device that has periodic access to a power source could be designed to refresh its own flash, but anything that ends up sitting on the shelf for extended periods is going to be trouble.
Along with error rates, what will happen to retention times as the cell size shrinks?
Supposedly, flash memories have expected retention times as short as 5-10 years or so (if not refreshed by re-writing), thanks to gradual leakage of the trapped charges they use to record data; this value is expected to drop as flash cells get smaller. I've had gadgets whose firmware mysteriously become corrupted after sitting around for a few years, and sometimes they could be revived by re-flashing them -- I sometimes wonder if this kind of retention problem could have been responsible.
Also, some vaccines, like the flu vaccine, are only made with eggs.
Switch to FluMist (nasal spray flu vaccine), it's produced using a cell-culture process and is completely egg-free. There might be some other brands now too, not sure as it's been a little while since I last worked in the influenza vaccine business.
1) My wife incurreed less than 150k total, most of it in med school, not undergrad. Its really not that difficult to get most of your undergrad paid for, if you aren't capable of this it means you put no effort into finding grants. There are litterally even grants for people who's parents make too much fucking money, so there is NO excuse for you to exit undergrad with massive debt other than your own
I am currently in medical school, and am looking at about the same amount of debt (all medical school, undergrad paid off already). That being said, I go to a state school (plus started with some savings, plus have some parental support). The amount of financial support each state gives to their schools varies greatly depending on the state though. Grants are uncommon (since everyone expects doctors will become rich) unless you you meet special criteria -- impoverished background, under-represented minority, or are affiliation with a cultural/ethnic/religious group backed by private donors (also heard of a few set-up by patient advocacy groups and rural communities).
Private schools can be stupidly expensive (some run 70k+ a year), I wouldn't go to one unless my family was rich.
3) Doctors get paid for residency, they don't pay someone else for the privledge of doing it. They are working at that point, just watched closer (though less than they should be!)
Around here I think you can expect 35-50k a year, depending on what program you're in. While this isn't too bad for a family medicine residency that goes 3 years, others can go as much as 7-8 years (but you'll be earning more afterwards).
4) Bullshit. The cost compared to income is fucking trivial. You can pretend its bad, but my car insurance is more than my wife's malpractice costs, so again trivial compared to income. If you're doctor is paying high malpractice rates then you're intelligent move would be to find a new doctor cause yours has been sued one too many times, which indicates a pattern you might not want to be part of.
An Ob-Gyn's typical malpractice premium is easily more than a family doc's entire yearly salary. An average general surgeon can expected to be sued every five years. The cost and risk of malpractice varies greatly across specialties; your wife is probably in one of the "safe" specialties (Family practice, Peds, Psych, Derm, a couple of others), or has her malpractice subsidized.
While Slashdot likes to rag on Big Pharma, GSK really doesn't get enough credit for it's charitable work, like their Lymphatic filariasis eradication campaign. They are the last of the major pharma companies that still has a tropical infectious disease division; it doesn't make any money, yet they've continued to operate it all these years, since the days of the British colonial period.
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But if somebody tells me a grand total of 13 different backup-generators dotted around the site and five battery-backups might all simultaneously fail due to various reasons he would have an extreremly hard time convincing me.
Replace "dotted around the site" with "all the in the same basement". And the depletion of all battery backups again was not independent, with a direct causual link both to the upstream generator failure, as well as the disruption to roads and infrastructure which delayed the arrival of additional resources.
http://www.blog.voximate.com/blog/article/1058/failover-backup-systems-redundant/
"The risk analysis may calculate the risk of each backup generator failing and then estimate the risk of all of them failing simultaneously by multiplying each generator’s risk of failure together, concluding that the risk of them all failing simultaneously is statistically very, very low. However, such an analysis assumes that the backup generators are all independent systems. As this crisis has demonstrated, the backup generators were NOT independent of each other. Because they were all in the same coast-side, sea level location, they all shared the common vulnerability of being shut down simultaneously by the same tsunami. Therefore, the actual risk of them all failing simultaneously due to a tsunami was equal to the risk of a single one of them failing due to a tsunami. Since all thirteen backup generators in actual fact failed when hit by this tsunami, the risk that each backup generator would fail when hit by a tsunami of this size appears to have been 100%."
since most of the subjects have been children with Sickle Cell and other types of anemia).
Huh. Now that makes a lot of sense as far as recruiting goes. I was wondering how they found people willing to undergo the risk of an partial-match bone-marrow transplant (and how to justify it to an ERB) in addition to their solid organ transplant.
Sounds too good to be true, and no evidence to support it. Recipe for a scam.
It's getting major buzz in the research community since the group presented preliminary results last year. Science magazine (about as legit as it gets) even titled their write-up "The Quest for Transplantation Tolerance: Have We Finally Sipped from the Cup?", as it truly is considered a holy grail of immunology.
I guess I thought that was common? Her donor was unrelated, but had a 10/10 match on HLA. That might be the magic. This study lists it working for a HLA mismatched recipient.
None of the 8 trial participants was a perfect match, ranging from 5/6 down to 1/6 (the article I have access to only lists the */6 system) with 4 organs coming from unrelated donors (the failed transplant case was actually a 3/6 related donor). Also, your daughter's very young age at transplant was a plus.
China was basically in a civil war at the beginning of WWII.
Not just at the beginning, but during WWII as well. Chiang-Kai Shek was a staunch anti-Communist, and believed (imho, correctly) the CCP to be as much of a long-term threat as the Japanese. The western powers put him under intense pressure to halt his campaign against the CCP and make an alliance against the Japanese (even then, he only did so after the Xi'an incident). Many historians believe it was the Japanese invasion and ensuing interruption in the civil war that allowed the communists to re-group (in the early stages of the conflict, the KMT very much had the upper hand) and attain eventual victory.
Voodoo from a decade ago.
Here's a link to a benchmark of 3dfx's never-released Voodoo5-6000 (modified and overclocked).
3dfx Voodoo5 6000 3700A Gold SE @201 MHz ( 3dmark2001se ): 6341 marks
Looks like you're right. An integrated nVidia ION does indeed beat it in benchmarks: http://hwbot.org/hardware/videocard/nvidia_ion_integrated/
There are a number of inducible suicide genes (for instance, the HSV1-TK gene, inducible with Acyclovir) that have been developed for this very purpose. I believe the group at U. Penn mentioned that they would like to incorporate such a feature -- but as a long-term possibility; no such "kill switch" is being used in their current treatments.
Cpt. Picard: "This is Captain Picard of the U.S.S. Minivan. Stardate 1231.4. Our voyage to the Walmart parking lot has thus far been uneventful. According to our orders, we are to rendevouz with Federation shoppers at--"
[Explosion. Ships rocks violently.]
Cmdr Riker: "Romulan Beemah decloaking off the starboard bow! ALL HANDS BATTLE STATIONS!"
As far as I know, there is nothing specific you can eat that is proven to boost your metabolism.
Nonsense. A dose of something like, say, 2,4-Dinitrophenol will absolutely increase your metabolic rate. Quite dramatically, and potentially to the point of lethal hyperthermia. On a side note, given DNP's effect on muscular intracellular Ca++ levels, I suspect it could have a demethylating effect similar to that obtained with caffeine used.
Oh please [sketch sketch] let there be porn like this [scribble]
Now pipe 4chan to it, and watch Microsoft's server commit suicide by setting itself on fire.
I remain baffled at how companies like Wizards of the Coast think it's acceptable to charge as much for online versions of stuff as they do for the real items (example here is MTG cards).
WoTC attempted to answer this by allowing MTG:Online players to trade a completed set of online cards for their real physical equivalents (originally for no extra cost, although they have since started tacking on a redemption fee). So in theory you could arbitrage the real and virtual versions.
Why do you assume it is a nerd?
He's posting on slashdot.
On a Friday evening.
"...There are simple tricks that are almost never noticed till a very high technology is attained. For instance, quantum torsion antennas can be built from silver and cobalt steel arrays, if the geometry is correct. Unfortunately, finding the proper geometry involves lots of theory and the ability to solve some large partial differential equations. There are many Slow Zoners who never discover the principle."
I wonder if its effectiveness differs with the language being spoken. Do faster-spoken languages become more stressful and difficult to continue with than slower-spoken ones?
Well, among languages, Japanese has an especially low information/syllable density (and thus is spoken rapidly). In comparison, languages such as Vietnamese, English and Mandarin Chinese have very high information densities, resulting in lower syllables-per-minute spoken.
My cynical interpretation is that Monsanto failed to make sufficiently generous offers for technology transfer. In which case the ban will last until Chinese laboratories make sufficient advances to field their own GM crops.
What I don't get is what this device is intended to be useful for if it's only able to sequence 150 million b.p. before wearing out. The article mentions that this is smaller than some human chromosomes, but unless they factored the necessary redundancy into that figure, it's not going to go very far.
Seeing as how this device uses a protein-based pore complex, I'm not surprised by the limited lifespan. Apparently, they offer a large array of pores to get the ensemble of fragments needed to assemble a complete sequence.
The technology has a 4% error rate, meaning that 4% of the bases are read incorrectly
Needs to drop an order of magnitude to be competitive, unless it's much cheaper than expected.
An invisible cloud of spores on an orbital trajectory that intersects with your planet. Being extremely tiny, the large surface area to mass ratio results in terminal velocities too low to burn up on re-entry. A few months later, your planet's population collapses.
Except for Madagascar :P
Growing in-vitro meat is essentially the same business as manufacturing advanced bio-pharmaceuticals -- you have the same issues of running a bioreactor with strict sterility requirements, complex growing media, and other expensive criteria.
Even if technological developments were able to drive the cost of doing mammalian cell culture to a fraction of its current price, you would still be an absolute fool to use your capacity to produce a low-priced commodity, compared with the high-margin drug products that you could instead be making.
The combination of yoga + weaponry apparently triggers a profile of "interested in single men".
Google thinks I'm gay... or possibly a woman, I'm not sure.
That's the beauty of it. As far as the advertiser is concerned, it doesn't matter which!
Retention time in 2003-time-frame flash is tens of years. Retention time for the latest 25nm flash is measured at one year.
Please tell me you're kidding -- only one year?
The flash retention problem is going to turn out as bad as the Capacitor Plague. A device that has periodic access to a power source could be designed to refresh its own flash, but anything that ends up sitting on the shelf for extended periods is going to be trouble.
Along with error rates, what will happen to retention times as the cell size shrinks?
Supposedly, flash memories have expected retention times as short as 5-10 years or so (if not refreshed by re-writing), thanks to gradual leakage of the trapped charges they use to record data; this value is expected to drop as flash cells get smaller. I've had gadgets whose firmware mysteriously become corrupted after sitting around for a few years, and sometimes they could be revived by re-flashing them -- I sometimes wonder if this kind of retention problem could have been responsible.
Also, some vaccines, like the flu vaccine, are only made with eggs.
Switch to FluMist (nasal spray flu vaccine), it's produced using a cell-culture process and is completely egg-free. There might be some other brands now too, not sure as it's been a little while since I last worked in the influenza vaccine business.
1) My wife incurreed less than 150k total, most of it in med school, not undergrad. Its really not that difficult to get most of your undergrad paid for, if you aren't capable of this it means you put no effort into finding grants. There are litterally even grants for people who's parents make too much fucking money, so there is NO excuse for you to exit undergrad with massive debt other than your own
I am currently in medical school, and am looking at about the same amount of debt (all medical school, undergrad paid off already). That being said, I go to a state school (plus started with some savings, plus have some parental support). The amount of financial support each state gives to their schools varies greatly depending on the state though. Grants are uncommon (since everyone expects doctors will become rich) unless you you meet special criteria -- impoverished background, under-represented minority, or are affiliation with a cultural/ethnic/religious group backed by private donors (also heard of a few set-up by patient advocacy groups and rural communities).
Private schools can be stupidly expensive (some run 70k+ a year), I wouldn't go to one unless my family was rich.
3) Doctors get paid for residency, they don't pay someone else for the privledge of doing it. They are working at that point, just watched closer (though less than they should be!)
Around here I think you can expect 35-50k a year, depending on what program you're in. While this isn't too bad for a family medicine residency that goes 3 years, others can go as much as 7-8 years (but you'll be earning more afterwards).
4) Bullshit. The cost compared to income is fucking trivial. You can pretend its bad, but my car insurance is more than my wife's malpractice costs, so again trivial compared to income. If you're doctor is paying high malpractice rates then you're intelligent move would be to find a new doctor cause yours has been sued one too many times, which indicates a pattern you might not want to be part of.
An Ob-Gyn's typical malpractice premium is easily more than a family doc's entire yearly salary. An average general surgeon can expected to be sued every five years. The cost and risk of malpractice varies greatly across specialties; your wife is probably in one of the "safe" specialties (Family practice, Peds, Psych, Derm, a couple of others), or has her malpractice subsidized.
I used to work for GlaxoSmithKline.
While Slashdot likes to rag on Big Pharma, GSK really doesn't get enough credit for it's charitable work, like their Lymphatic filariasis eradication campaign. They are the last of the major pharma companies that still has a tropical infectious disease division; it doesn't make any money, yet they've continued to operate it all these years, since the days of the British colonial period.