I'd should put in a plug for iBlog from lifli software. After trying a few blogging software packages over the past three years or so, I have standardized on iBlog for my site. If you run OS X, iBlog is one of the easiest packages out there that allows a fairly decent degree of flexibility. I chose it because of the ease of hosting images from my photography and media files along with the minimal time required to manage and back up the entire database. My time is getting extremely valuable these days and the less time I have to spend managing a blog package, the better.
Interestingly, it is amazing how much traffic and the variety of opportunities that have popped up from posting to a blog. There have been invitations to give talks, queries for visits from folks like Adobe and Apple, requests for images to publish and purchase etc....etc...etc... Additionally, blogs serve as a means for professional contacts to get to know a side of you that never really appears in a professional setting. For instance, a couple of potential investors have found my site and a common dialogue about photography certainly helped smooth early meetings out a bit.
I never would have thought about these possibilities as the blog was originally simply set up to communicate with friends and family. I hate the term, but the "Web 2.0" is starting to fulfill the promise of the Internet back in the late 80's. With a blog, publishing becomes relatively straight forward such as the quirky children's books that I just posted. Granted, the signal to noise ratio is going down with increased blogspace traffic, but search engines have realized where the growth is and will help with that over the next little while. Now if we could just get rid of the spamblogs....
Well, I don't know if destroying the foundations of biology will really "uproot the economy", since the only useful application of biological science is medicine.
I can assure you that this perspective is most incorrect. Think agribusiness which in Kansas is most important, yeah? Like corn?. Think about veterinary medicine. Think about aquaculture. Think about ecology. Think about bio-diesel. Think about engineering of surfactants to reduce friction. Think about engineering (did you know that the desert salt bush can maintain internal negative pressures far below the boiling point of water?). Think about armor (did you know that the Army is investing lots of money studying insect exoskeletons?). Think about etc...etc...etc... I could go on and on and on with this topic, so please, please think before you say something like that.
Just pointing out, you live in Utah. You go to a Utah college. And you think Kansas mixes religion and state?!?
1) I do not "go" to a Utah college. I am a professor at the University of Utah whose history in computer science, genetics and bioscience have made significant contributions to science.
2) You are assuming that because I live in Utah and "go" to a Utah college, I must therefore be a part of the moral majority here. You would be mistaken in that assumption and fairly ignorant to suppose it. However, I will tell you that the Mormon contributions to genetics through their recognition of genealogy and genetics has made many advancements in medicine and biology possible.
So, why is it that the Kansas board of "education" will not allow science and religion to be separately taught? 1) Primarily because they have an agenda that is religiously biased. 2) Because if they allowed a religion class, they would be hard pressed to only teach their version of religion and not also teach Islam, Judaism, Hinduism etc...etc...etc... which these types of people believe would not be acceptable. After all, thinking for yourself is scary.
Look, before all you ultra right wing whackos start modding me down, you should realize that 1) I am religious and 2) I am also a scientist and see no conflict between religion and science and 3) the Intelligent Design camp are absolutely and completely biased and corruptive of both religion and science. Schools teaching ID are absolutely doing a disservice to the students who are forced to take this curriculum.
And those in the Kansas government should know that this issue is making Kansas a laughing stock world wide. There is absolutely nothing that you could do to get me to move my family, science or business there. Speaking of business, we are in the initial stages of moving technologies we have developed into the privately funded domain and early estimates are that we are sitting on significantly large markets right out the door with significant expansion likely in a variety of areas. Kansas does not remotely have a chance of attracting businesses like ours given the educational climate required for our work. We need students and employees who are well prepared in the sciences and are capable of thinking independently, and if the school board succeeds in misleading their students, they are of no use to us.
Well, in a sense, we already are. I know Glen (the creator of the biogel in the linked article), and one of the problems they are going to have is determining the identity of cells within complex tissues that were previously thought to be homogeneous. It turns out that kidneys (and many other appearing homogeneous tissues) are actually incredibly complex. New methodologies in tissue identity and tracking need to be applied here and we have the tools. Check out some of the images generated by these tools here.
The best way to manage geeks? Well, I pretty much treat them like any other employee. Honesty, fair and equitable treatment for everyone while not indulging high maintenance employees at the expense of others. You pay people what they are worth, treat them with respect, challenge them while rewarding success and you will have lower turnover and decreased personnel costs. However, the geeks (typically programmers, but hard to define in science) need to realize that they are part of a team and they are part of a greater whole. Those who need more, will move on to other companies or their own companies and that is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the longer you can hold onto those successful individuals, the more successful your company/organization will be.
I am sure that there have been some issues, that I have written about before, notably the porting of hand coded Altivec instruction sets to equivalent Intel specific instructions. However, the code bases between Intel and PPC have been pretty close to one another going back to the NeXTstep days. You do remember that NeXTstep ran on Intel, right? At any rate, the next step, no pun intended:-), should be interesting indeed. I am hoping for additional professional plans that Intel specific chips should allow, particularly at the subnotebook (or even Newton formfactor) level. I have been travelling more and even the 12in Powerbook, which has been the best laptop I've ever owned, is starting to be cumbersome.
Fundamentally, Apple Computer has invested in research and development and has come out with revolutionary products that functionally make things easier while Dell has simply operated as a reseller and box builder. Where is the innovation coming out of Dell?
Although I just yesterday placed an order for two $379 commodity boxes from Dell that I will run headless behind OS X boxes for security reasons, almost all of our purchases have been going to Apple. From the Mac Mini to iMacs to dual G5s with 30in Cinema Displays, Apple has been building systems around an operating system, OS X that meets our needs. In addition, the security issues make them easier to administrate, freeing up time to get work done that we are actually interested in.
Don't try your mind tricks on me young man.:-) Seriously though, the amount I will pay is what I believe it is worth to me, and that is up to $5.00. I go to matinees specifically because the average Hollywood fare is simply not worth the $7-14 that theaters charge for prime time showings and it is not because money is tight for me. Quite the contrary, I am more than happy to pay extra for quality products, but in this case, movies are entertainment that while entertaining are usually are quite dispensable and having to deal with an increasingly rude population who does not have any concept of proper theatre etiquette simply drives me away from theaters. There are rare cinematic exceptions however.
Well, if Sony is going to be trying to install rootkits onto my computer, they could not pay me to download their movies. Screw-em.
However, barring malware distribution by major corporations, I believe that Apple has showed the industry exactly the business model to follow for media distribution, so, provided a fair and reasonable DRM policy like that of iTunes, I would be more than happy to pay $5/movie, but not more than that. Come on now, the industry has the opportunity here to make far more money off of not just recently released movies, but following a long-tail model, they could make obscene amounts of money off of older movies/content that is no longer available or being distributed. Think about all the old classic Sci-Fi movies or classic movies that are only available on TCM on occasion? What if you really could watch them "on demand" rather than waiting for them to rotate through. How about old TV shows?
Being able to watch movies at home on your computer or on your laptop on the plane is not just a convenience that they should be charging premium costs for. It is a mass market scheme to drive insanely high revenues if the price point is made attractive. If they were smart, these movies would be made available more cheaply and the "premium" experience could still be had at the theatre.
So, for an industry that already is sitting on media that is no longer generating significant income, they have the opportunity to create potential huge revenue streams for media already bought and paid for, so why gouge the customer? It is a surefire recipe for slower adoption, delayed revenue streams and potentially failure.
Well, there is this thing call anonymity.... Oh, don't forget free speech. Last time I checked, there is no clause in the Constitution saying anything about how old you have to be to qualify for the First Amendment. By the way, if you are in the DC area, you owe it to yourself to stop by the National Archives and see the Constitution. It had a surprisingly profound impact on this jaded science geek.
Back on topic: On legal grounds, because the school is a religious school, they can make certain requirements. For instance, I once dated a girl that was recruited from Norway to be on the BYU ski team. She accepted because of the scholarship even though she was not part of the "moral majority" there. Here is the deal though... they made her sign an "agreement" that she would not consume coffee or alcohol even while not on school grounds. She abided by that contract, and honored it. But when her parents came into town, she went to dinner with her family. She did not have any wine at dinner, while her parents did. Two days later, she was called into the Presidents office because someone had reported (ratted) her for being with people who were consuming alcohol. The deal is though, because this was a religious school, there are no personal rights issues at stake and she had no recourse. Her personal choice was to leave BYU and her scholarship behind because she was so offended.
Of course this is one of the major problems associated with federal funding of religious programs for charity or education. These charities can discriminate and there are no federal protections for these folks who are discriminated against even though the source of the funds are federal in nature. Shockingly, there have been discrimination cases based upon religion, race or appearance that are being upheld because "private" churches or schools can make any requirements on their "clubs" they want. Historically, the protection has been that any organization that receives federal funding cannot discriminate, but the new rules blow this away.
Don't get me wrong, I consider myself religious and was raised Catholic, but large organized religions have proven difficult for me to participate in.
The problem with this is that the structure of the Internet is difficult to navigate and difficult to index a system that is constantly changing. Enforcing some sort of "structure" will make things more easily searched, organized and reliable. There's lots of us PhDs that are interested in indexing information, but for particular questions, you need to be able to structure data in some form that allows accessibility.
Perhaps more importantly, this move positions Google as potentially the pre-eminent publishing house with an inherent built in search engine. Anything that goes into the database will be "intimately" searchable. From my perspective as a bioscientist, the ability to be able to search journal articles not just for text, but also for image data or graph data would be absolutely huge.
Google has previously posted their position about Google Print here where they documented superficially their desire to enable people to search for "books". However, more importantly, it is the content within the "books" that will become more ubiquitous and more available.
Or does "motorcycle" nowadays just mean sticking an Orange County Choppers sticker on the rear window of your SUV and going home to watch TV shows about motorcycles?
Funny. Truly funny and one of the reasons I enjoy reading your posts.
If they really want to push more efficient automobiles, perhaps we could wean the American preference for the large SUV? I wrote about this some time ago here, talking about small car companies like Smart who really should be looking harder at the American market and employing creative marketing approaches to specific markets that would be most receptive to the small car.
Of course a real way of going "green" would be to simply make it easier for people to telecommute. We saw a huge interest in telecommuting a couple of years ago, but since then, many corporations have cut back on telecommuting or reversed earlier policies.
Programs to make broadband more ubiquitous and accessible would enable inexpensive video conferencing technologies (like iChat with an iSight), audio conferencing and the ability to be persistently available, which could be a bad thing for salaried employees though:-)
It was explained to me this way when I was researching the cost of medicine in New Zealand versus the USA. "Look mate, we got rid of all the lawyers in the system and can actually afford to provide healthcare to every single one of our citizens as well as many visitors to our country". Perhaps that is a little simplistic, but there is an element of truth to that. I've written before on the number of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Bentlys and Maybachs! that I've seen in Sarasota, Florida. Apparently, a good number of the class action lawyers for the tobacco settlements live there and in fact, there was one law firm out on the key where I was staying that routinely had the most amazing high dollar automobiles out there. (Ever seen a Mclaren on the street?) That money comes from somewhere.
The reasons for high number of suits in healthcare are somewhat different that that for tech companies lawsuits, which are more dependent upon a broken patent system which allows frivolous patents.
As one who lives in the Northern Hemisphere, the Christmas celebrations in Auckland, New Zealand struck me as particularly wonderful and fascinating. Santa Claus arriving in the part in a metal flake custom painted sleigh, carried over the shorts and T-shirt wearing crowd by a large crane as he "flew" in with hip-hop blasting was pretty cool.
Thank you Apple! Once again this company (along with ABC this time) has the stones to step up and offer a service that is a market primed to explode. The iTMS has proven to be a good long tail business model for the distribution of music, offering popular and otherwise out of print or hard to find (Indie) tracks that are simply unavailable in the large retail outlets. I have not watched much TV in the past while, but having the iTMS model of distribution for TV shows that are out of syndication or are otherwise hard to obtain would be a tremendous boon. And if Ted Turner would get on the ball, all sorts of older movies could also be made available via this model, that would increase revenues over what they are making by the current limited access to the media. Documentaries, "foreign" (to the US) films, and indie films could make it truly big by talking to Apple. Sundance Channel and TCM, you are the big guys in this market......So, are you paying attention? And for you TIVOheads out there, in essence, if this propagates to the rest of the industry, this will be a centralized TIVO allowing you to pick and choose without having to take the time to program, and like the article said, this could make the ala carte system moot. Who knows, this could even open up the option of letting us pay for content that is without commercials or get it for "free" if we agree to watch the commercials. It's could simply be our choice.
P.S., Ted, thanks for the buffalo ranching, but there is more money to be made still in media. Don't give up.
Yikes, It seems like most stuff linked to New Zealand go down pretty quick after being linked on Slashdot, so....
Weta spends up on blade servers 10 October 2005
Weta Digital has bought 250 more blade servers with a total list price of between $2 million and $3 million to complete post-production work on Peter Jackson's King Kong, due out in January.
The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory, are housed at the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre in central Wellington. They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs. The servers run the Red Hat version of the open-source Linux operating system. The purchase means the centre is back among the 100 largest supercomputing clusters in the world. Weta Digital has another bank of 500 blade servers in Miramar. It bought the processors that now make up the centre to finish the special effects for The Return of the King, after running out of space in its computer rooms in Miramar. The centre is a joint venture between Weta and Telecom-owned Gen-i, which supplied the latest batch of processors. Other businesses using the centre include a chip maker, a biotech company and a yacht designer.
So, out of curiosity. What happened to the export restrictions of the US government on CPU's beyond a certain MIPS range? I remember that the old PowerMac 9600/300 eclipsed this federally mandated figure and now we have home game consoles that easily eclipse that performance range. Certainly the advent of cluster computing with commodity hardware made many of these issues moot, but what is the status of the law? Was it repealed or is it just commonly ignored?
I know that historically, NeXT did quite a bit of work for TLA agencies and that Richard Crandall's program, zilla.app grabbed some attention from interested parties. Because of this work, NeXT had some cash infusion for their hardware even after shutting the line down for general commercial consumption. More recently, Apple has been selling Xserves to some of those same agencies, and contractors for work, but I do not know if they are selling any clusters outside the US?
The history of course behind this law was that the CIA and NSA were concerned that foreign governments could use compute time to help design nuclear weapons as well as defeat cryptography that might compromise US secrets.
What is it with these pseudo companies that are formed just to hold supposed IP? We have companies like SCO group, Forgent Networks and NTP who do not really have any products, but whose business model is to go out and purchase any and all "patents" they can get their hands on. They then do nothing with those patents until one day in the future, they identify some product or company that has a product that has come about through parallel evolution or innovation and then try and sue the pants off of them. Most of these companies employees are not doing anything productive as they are a bunch of lawyers on staff who are parasites on technology and innovation doing nothing but sucking the life out innovation and progress.
It has got to be apparent that this business model has nothing to do with innovation and everything to do with piracy and racketeering.
To clarify for everyone else who may not know where that quote came from: you are quoting from my blog which is really written for friends and family. Many of my friends are scientists and know what I am talking about with respect to phosphodiesterases (PDE), but I also try and make things accessible to a wider variety of folks who may drop by from the Internet, principally through my photography. Thanks for the feedback though. I will try and make things more accessible.
Actually, no. I don't mean "editing one particular article". While making a number of anonymous edits for anatomy, physiology, epilepsy and neuroscience I have been experiencing the problems I was referring to. My attempt at editing the Retinitis Pigmentosa article was an effort at logging into the system to see if that made any difference with respect to resolving the problem. Granted, this particular post did reflect my work, it was an attempt to see if a "personal statement" for my work had any bearing on whether or not the material would be retained. I am left with the impression that the best solution for many is to continue to publish in the traditional journals like Science and Nature and others and let the anonymous folks on the Internet duke it out with each other on Wikipedia until some better editorial system is in place. Otherwise, those of us with some degree of expertise are wasting our time.
As for being in the wrong section, perhaps you could state why you feel that is the case? I have not entered into discussion yet as my teaching duties and travel responsibilities for meetings have simply occupied all of my time for the last couple of months. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day and I don't have all the time to perform my work, edit Wikipedia articles and post on Slashdot, yeah?
So, based upon your admittedly limited access to those articles that you were able to find in a 20 second search, don't you feel that you might be a little biased in your statements? Using terms like "seems clear" and making personal attacks based upon limited access to the information is hardly helpful now, is it?
No offense, but considering you are in Utah, most famous for a certain religion that holds certain viewpoints quite at odds with mainstream scientific thought,....
You sir are a bigoted asshole and yes, I will stand behind that statement and would be happy to tell it to your face.
I realize that this may be feeding the troll, but in an attempt to educate someone who should know better given that you claim to have a doctorate, than to post drivel like this I will state that the examples I am talking about covered everything from retinal anatomy and physiology to epilepsy and neurophysiology. The journal articles and textbooks referenced include everything from Science, Nature, The Journal of Comparative Neurology, Epilepsia, etc....etc...etc...
And for the record, while yes, I live in Utah, I am not a mormon, nor do I share any of their belief systems. I do however respect their desire and right to believe and practice their religion. This is still the United States of America, right? Furthermore, your assumption that anybody from Utah must therefore belong to one particular group illustrates a remarkable shallowness of thought that would effectively limit your objectiveness and renders any publication that you may have made in Slashdot or PNAS, suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd should put in a plug for iBlog from lifli software. After trying a few blogging software packages over the past three years or so, I have standardized on iBlog for my site. If you run OS X, iBlog is one of the easiest packages out there that allows a fairly decent degree of flexibility. I chose it because of the ease of hosting images from my photography and media files along with the minimal time required to manage and back up the entire database. My time is getting extremely valuable these days and the less time I have to spend managing a blog package, the better.
Interestingly, it is amazing how much traffic and the variety of opportunities that have popped up from posting to a blog. There have been invitations to give talks, queries for visits from folks like Adobe and Apple, requests for images to publish and purchase etc....etc...etc... Additionally, blogs serve as a means for professional contacts to get to know a side of you that never really appears in a professional setting. For instance, a couple of potential investors have found my site and a common dialogue about photography certainly helped smooth early meetings out a bit.
I never would have thought about these possibilities as the blog was originally simply set up to communicate with friends and family. I hate the term, but the "Web 2.0" is starting to fulfill the promise of the Internet back in the late 80's. With a blog, publishing becomes relatively straight forward such as the quirky children's books that I just posted. Granted, the signal to noise ratio is going down with increased blogspace traffic, but search engines have realized where the growth is and will help with that over the next little while. Now if we could just get rid of the spamblogs....
Well, I don't know if destroying the foundations of biology will really "uproot the economy", since the only useful application of biological science is medicine.
I can assure you that this perspective is most incorrect. Think agribusiness which in Kansas is most important, yeah? Like corn?. Think about veterinary medicine. Think about aquaculture. Think about ecology. Think about bio-diesel. Think about engineering of surfactants to reduce friction. Think about engineering (did you know that the desert salt bush can maintain internal negative pressures far below the boiling point of water?). Think about armor (did you know that the Army is investing lots of money studying insect exoskeletons?). Think about etc...etc...etc... I could go on and on and on with this topic, so please, please think before you say something like that.
Just pointing out, you live in Utah. You go to a Utah college. And you think Kansas mixes religion and state?!?
1) I do not "go" to a Utah college. I am a professor at the University of Utah whose history in computer science, genetics and bioscience have made significant contributions to science.
2) You are assuming that because I live in Utah and "go" to a Utah college, I must therefore be a part of the moral majority here. You would be mistaken in that assumption and fairly ignorant to suppose it. However, I will tell you that the Mormon contributions to genetics through their recognition of genealogy and genetics has made many advancements in medicine and biology possible.
So, why is it that the Kansas board of "education" will not allow science and religion to be separately taught? 1) Primarily because they have an agenda that is religiously biased. 2) Because if they allowed a religion class, they would be hard pressed to only teach their version of religion and not also teach Islam, Judaism, Hinduism etc...etc...etc... which these types of people believe would not be acceptable. After all, thinking for yourself is scary.
Look, before all you ultra right wing whackos start modding me down, you should realize that 1) I am religious and 2) I am also a scientist and see no conflict between religion and science and 3) the Intelligent Design camp are absolutely and completely biased and corruptive of both religion and science. Schools teaching ID are absolutely doing a disservice to the students who are forced to take this curriculum.
And those in the Kansas government should know that this issue is making Kansas a laughing stock world wide. There is absolutely nothing that you could do to get me to move my family, science or business there. Speaking of business, we are in the initial stages of moving technologies we have developed into the privately funded domain and early estimates are that we are sitting on significantly large markets right out the door with significant expansion likely in a variety of areas. Kansas does not remotely have a chance of attracting businesses like ours given the educational climate required for our work. We need students and employees who are well prepared in the sciences and are capable of thinking independently, and if the school board succeeds in misleading their students, they are of no use to us.
Well, in a sense, we already are. I know Glen (the creator of the biogel in the linked article), and one of the problems they are going to have is determining the identity of cells within complex tissues that were previously thought to be homogeneous. It turns out that kidneys (and many other appearing homogeneous tissues) are actually incredibly complex. New methodologies in tissue identity and tracking need to be applied here and we have the tools. Check out some of the images generated by these tools here.
The best way to manage geeks? Well, I pretty much treat them like any other employee. Honesty, fair and equitable treatment for everyone while not indulging high maintenance employees at the expense of others. You pay people what they are worth, treat them with respect, challenge them while rewarding success and you will have lower turnover and decreased personnel costs. However, the geeks (typically programmers, but hard to define in science) need to realize that they are part of a team and they are part of a greater whole. Those who need more, will move on to other companies or their own companies and that is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the longer you can hold onto those successful individuals, the more successful your company/organization will be.
I am sure that there have been some issues, that I have written about before, notably the porting of hand coded Altivec instruction sets to equivalent Intel specific instructions. However, the code bases between Intel and PPC have been pretty close to one another going back to the NeXTstep days. You do remember that NeXTstep ran on Intel, right? At any rate, the next step, no pun intended :-), should be interesting indeed. I am hoping for additional professional plans that Intel specific chips should allow, particularly at the subnotebook (or even Newton formfactor) level. I have been travelling more and even the 12in Powerbook, which has been the best laptop I've ever owned, is starting to be cumbersome.
Fundamentally, Apple Computer has invested in research and development and has come out with revolutionary products that functionally make things easier while Dell has simply operated as a reseller and box builder. Where is the innovation coming out of Dell?
Although I just yesterday placed an order for two $379 commodity boxes from Dell that I will run headless behind OS X boxes for security reasons, almost all of our purchases have been going to Apple. From the Mac Mini to iMacs to dual G5s with 30in Cinema Displays, Apple has been building systems around an operating system, OS X that meets our needs. In addition, the security issues make them easier to administrate, freeing up time to get work done that we are actually interested in.
Don't try your mind tricks on me young man. :-) Seriously though, the amount I will pay is what I believe it is worth to me, and that is up to $5.00. I go to matinees specifically because the average Hollywood fare is simply not worth the $7-14 that theaters charge for prime time showings and it is not because money is tight for me. Quite the contrary, I am more than happy to pay extra for quality products, but in this case, movies are entertainment that while entertaining are usually are quite dispensable and having to deal with an increasingly rude population who does not have any concept of proper theatre etiquette simply drives me away from theaters. There are rare cinematic exceptions however.
Well, if Sony is going to be trying to install rootkits onto my computer, they could not pay me to download their movies. Screw-em.
However, barring malware distribution by major corporations, I believe that Apple has showed the industry exactly the business model to follow for media distribution, so, provided a fair and reasonable DRM policy like that of iTunes, I would be more than happy to pay $5/movie, but not more than that. Come on now, the industry has the opportunity here to make far more money off of not just recently released movies, but following a long-tail model, they could make obscene amounts of money off of older movies/content that is no longer available or being distributed. Think about all the old classic Sci-Fi movies or classic movies that are only available on TCM on occasion? What if you really could watch them "on demand" rather than waiting for them to rotate through. How about old TV shows?
Being able to watch movies at home on your computer or on your laptop on the plane is not just a convenience that they should be charging premium costs for. It is a mass market scheme to drive insanely high revenues if the price point is made attractive. If they were smart, these movies would be made available more cheaply and the "premium" experience could still be had at the theatre.
So, for an industry that already is sitting on media that is no longer generating significant income, they have the opportunity to create potential huge revenue streams for media already bought and paid for, so why gouge the customer? It is a surefire recipe for slower adoption, delayed revenue streams and potentially failure.
Well, there is this thing call anonymity.... Oh, don't forget free speech. Last time I checked, there is no clause in the Constitution saying anything about how old you have to be to qualify for the First Amendment. By the way, if you are in the DC area, you owe it to yourself to stop by the National Archives and see the Constitution. It had a surprisingly profound impact on this jaded science geek.
Back on topic: On legal grounds, because the school is a religious school, they can make certain requirements. For instance, I once dated a girl that was recruited from Norway to be on the BYU ski team. She accepted because of the scholarship even though she was not part of the "moral majority" there. Here is the deal though... they made her sign an "agreement" that she would not consume coffee or alcohol even while not on school grounds. She abided by that contract, and honored it. But when her parents came into town, she went to dinner with her family. She did not have any wine at dinner, while her parents did. Two days later, she was called into the Presidents office because someone had reported (ratted) her for being with people who were consuming alcohol. The deal is though, because this was a religious school, there are no personal rights issues at stake and she had no recourse. Her personal choice was to leave BYU and her scholarship behind because she was so offended.
Of course this is one of the major problems associated with federal funding of religious programs for charity or education. These charities can discriminate and there are no federal protections for these folks who are discriminated against even though the source of the funds are federal in nature. Shockingly, there have been discrimination cases based upon religion, race or appearance that are being upheld because "private" churches or schools can make any requirements on their "clubs" they want. Historically, the protection has been that any organization that receives federal funding cannot discriminate, but the new rules blow this away.
Don't get me wrong, I consider myself religious and was raised Catholic, but large organized religions have proven difficult for me to participate in.
See my answer here for why. In short, there needs to be a way to structure certain "types" of data to optimize how you find what you are looking for.
The problem with this is that the structure of the Internet is difficult to navigate and difficult to index a system that is constantly changing. Enforcing some sort of "structure" will make things more easily searched, organized and reliable. There's lots of us PhDs that are interested in indexing information, but for particular questions, you need to be able to structure data in some form that allows accessibility.
Perhaps more importantly, this move positions Google as potentially the pre-eminent publishing house with an inherent built in search engine. Anything that goes into the database will be "intimately" searchable. From my perspective as a bioscientist, the ability to be able to search journal articles not just for text, but also for image data or graph data would be absolutely huge.
Google has previously posted their position about Google Print here where they documented superficially their desire to enable people to search for "books". However, more importantly, it is the content within the "books" that will become more ubiquitous and more available.
Or does "motorcycle" nowadays just mean sticking an Orange County Choppers sticker on the rear window of your SUV and going home to watch TV shows about motorcycles?
Funny. Truly funny and one of the reasons I enjoy reading your posts.
If they really want to push more efficient automobiles, perhaps we could wean the American preference for the large SUV? I wrote about this some time ago here, talking about small car companies like Smart who really should be looking harder at the American market and employing creative marketing approaches to specific markets that would be most receptive to the small car.
Of course a real way of going "green" would be to simply make it easier for people to telecommute. We saw a huge interest in telecommuting a couple of years ago, but since then, many corporations have cut back on telecommuting or reversed earlier policies.
Programs to make broadband more ubiquitous and accessible would enable inexpensive video conferencing technologies (like iChat with an iSight), audio conferencing and the ability to be persistently available, which could be a bad thing for salaried employees though
It was explained to me this way when I was researching the cost of medicine in New Zealand versus the USA. "Look mate, we got rid of all the lawyers in the system and can actually afford to provide healthcare to every single one of our citizens as well as many visitors to our country". Perhaps that is a little simplistic, but there is an element of truth to that. I've written before on the number of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Bentlys and Maybachs! that I've seen in Sarasota, Florida. Apparently, a good number of the class action lawyers for the tobacco settlements live there and in fact, there was one law firm out on the key where I was staying that routinely had the most amazing high dollar automobiles out there. (Ever seen a Mclaren on the street?) That money comes from somewhere.
The reasons for high number of suits in healthcare are somewhat different that that for tech companies lawsuits, which are more dependent upon a broken patent system which allows frivolous patents.
As one who lives in the Northern Hemisphere, the Christmas celebrations in Auckland, New Zealand struck me as particularly wonderful and fascinating. Santa Claus arriving in the part in a metal flake custom painted sleigh, carried over the shorts and T-shirt wearing crowd by a large crane as he "flew" in with hip-hop blasting was pretty cool.
Thank you Apple! Once again this company (along with ABC this time) has the stones to step up and offer a service that is a market primed to explode. The iTMS has proven to be a good long tail business model for the distribution of music, offering popular and otherwise out of print or hard to find (Indie) tracks that are simply unavailable in the large retail outlets. I have not watched much TV in the past while, but having the iTMS model of distribution for TV shows that are out of syndication or are otherwise hard to obtain would be a tremendous boon. And if Ted Turner would get on the ball, all sorts of older movies could also be made available via this model, that would increase revenues over what they are making by the current limited access to the media. Documentaries, "foreign" (to the US) films, and indie films could make it truly big by talking to Apple. Sundance Channel and TCM, you are the big guys in this market......So, are you paying attention? And for you TIVOheads out there, in essence, if this propagates to the rest of the industry, this will be a centralized TIVO allowing you to pick and choose without having to take the time to program, and like the article said, this could make the ala carte system moot. Who knows, this could even open up the option of letting us pay for content that is without commercials or get it for "free" if we agree to watch the commercials. It's could simply be our choice.
P.S., Ted, thanks for the buffalo ranching, but there is more money to be made still in media. Don't give up.
Yikes, It seems like most stuff linked to New Zealand go down pretty quick after being linked on Slashdot, so....
Weta spends up on blade servers
10 October 2005
Weta Digital has bought 250 more blade servers with a total list price of between $2 million and $3 million to complete post-production work on Peter Jackson's King Kong, due out in January.
The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory, are housed at the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre in central Wellington. They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs. The servers run the Red Hat version of the open-source Linux operating system. The purchase means the centre is back among the 100 largest supercomputing clusters in the world. Weta Digital has another bank of 500 blade servers in Miramar. It bought the processors that now make up the centre to finish the special effects for The Return of the King, after running out of space in its computer rooms in Miramar. The centre is a joint venture between Weta and Telecom-owned Gen-i, which supplied the latest batch of processors. Other businesses using the centre include a chip maker, a biotech company and a yacht designer.
So, out of curiosity. What happened to the export restrictions of the US government on CPU's beyond a certain MIPS range? I remember that the old PowerMac 9600/300 eclipsed this federally mandated figure and now we have home game consoles that easily eclipse that performance range. Certainly the advent of cluster computing with commodity hardware made many of these issues moot, but what is the status of the law? Was it repealed or is it just commonly ignored?
I know that historically, NeXT did quite a bit of work for TLA agencies and that Richard Crandall's program, zilla.app grabbed some attention from interested parties. Because of this work, NeXT had some cash infusion for their hardware even after shutting the line down for general commercial consumption. More recently, Apple has been selling Xserves to some of those same agencies, and contractors for work, but I do not know if they are selling any clusters outside the US?
The history of course behind this law was that the CIA and NSA were concerned that foreign governments could use compute time to help design nuclear weapons as well as defeat cryptography that might compromise US secrets.
What is it with these pseudo companies that are formed just to hold supposed IP? We have companies like SCO group, Forgent Networks and NTP who do not really have any products, but whose business model is to go out and purchase any and all "patents" they can get their hands on. They then do nothing with those patents until one day in the future, they identify some product or company that has a product that has come about through parallel evolution or innovation and then try and sue the pants off of them. Most of these companies employees are not doing anything productive as they are a bunch of lawyers on staff who are parasites on technology and innovation doing nothing but sucking the life out innovation and progress.
It has got to be apparent that this business model has nothing to do with innovation and everything to do with piracy and racketeering.
To clarify for everyone else who may not know where that quote came from: you are quoting from my blog which is really written for friends and family. Many of my friends are scientists and know what I am talking about with respect to phosphodiesterases (PDE), but I also try and make things accessible to a wider variety of folks who may drop by from the Internet, principally through my photography. Thanks for the feedback though. I will try and make things more accessible.
Actually, no. I don't mean "editing one particular article". While making a number of anonymous edits for anatomy, physiology, epilepsy and neuroscience I have been experiencing the problems I was referring to. My attempt at editing the Retinitis Pigmentosa article was an effort at logging into the system to see if that made any difference with respect to resolving the problem. Granted, this particular post did reflect my work, it was an attempt to see if a "personal statement" for my work had any bearing on whether or not the material would be retained. I am left with the impression that the best solution for many is to continue to publish in the traditional journals like Science and Nature and others and let the anonymous folks on the Internet duke it out with each other on Wikipedia until some better editorial system is in place. Otherwise, those of us with some degree of expertise are wasting our time.
As for being in the wrong section, perhaps you could state why you feel that is the case? I have not entered into discussion yet as my teaching duties and travel responsibilities for meetings have simply occupied all of my time for the last couple of months. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day and I don't have all the time to perform my work, edit Wikipedia articles and post on Slashdot, yeah?
So, based upon your admittedly limited access to those articles that you were able to find in a 20 second search, don't you feel that you might be a little biased in your statements? Using terms like "seems clear" and making personal attacks based upon limited access to the information is hardly helpful now, is it?
No offense, but considering you are in Utah, most famous for a certain religion that holds certain viewpoints quite at odds with mainstream scientific thought,....
You sir are a bigoted asshole and yes, I will stand behind that statement and would be happy to tell it to your face.
I realize that this may be feeding the troll, but in an attempt to educate someone who should know better given that you claim to have a doctorate, than to post drivel like this I will state that the examples I am talking about covered everything from retinal anatomy and physiology to epilepsy and neurophysiology. The journal articles and textbooks referenced include everything from Science, Nature, The Journal of Comparative Neurology, Epilepsia, etc....etc...etc...
And for the record, while yes, I live in Utah, I am not a mormon, nor do I share any of their belief systems. I do however respect their desire and right to believe and practice their religion. This is still the United States of America, right? Furthermore, your assumption that anybody from Utah must therefore belong to one particular group illustrates a remarkable shallowness of thought that would effectively limit your objectiveness and renders any publication that you may have made in Slashdot or PNAS, suspect.