The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
Oh Pages does make beautiful PDFs, no doubt. OS X actually has the PDF engine and Pages just calls it to my understanding.
However, what Pages does not do is deal with all the features of PDFs including forms, markup and more.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
Been there, done that. TeX/LaTeX is nice and cross platform, but for real page layout, you should really try Pages...
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, I started using Pages back in February of 2005, so I guess Microsoft had something to emulate for at least a couple of years.:-)
Admittedly, I've not used Office 2007 much because of an initial attempt at using the trial version corrupted *all* of my.doc files to be only compatible with the new Office 2007, essentially forcing users to upgrade and make the purchase. That irritated me considerably and if I did not have a backup to recover everything, I would have been really upset. However, since I've been moving most of our systems to OS X from Windows and Linux, it has not been an issue, and Pages is so much nicer... Though I'll carefully give the new Mac Version of Office 2008 a try when it is finalized.
The best tools stay out of the way...
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Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem with Word and notably Microsoft, is that they have attempted to make both Windows and their apps, notably Office, all things to all people with an interface that has not really changed at all over the course of its lifetime.
I used to think that the reality of the situation was that you really could not have a professional class word processing application that does all things that professional writers need used by the same audience that merely wants to write school reports or letters to friends. However, it is all in the interface and Pages from Apple has shown that many of the "professional" features in word processing have to do with page layout or formatting issues as well as integrating not just text and fonts, but also images. Fundamentally the issue with interfaces is not providing features piled on features, but figuring out how to craft a tool that people can use to get work done rather than having to learn how to use the tool. I want my word processing environment to simply let me craft written word and images into a form that allows me to communicate my intent to the audience without getting in the way or making me learn arcane and occult methods for getting my page numbers to appear just right or getting the text to wrap around an embedded image without constantly having to reformat an entire 80 (or more) page document. Writing my doctoral dissertation in Word back in 2003 was a repeated lesson in pain as every time I changed a single image, the formatting of the entire document would be altered with entire paragraphs seeming to disappear or get hidden outside of margins and I never want to return to that world.
Granted, I still have to return to Word from time to time as Pages is not yet perfect, still needing better integration with Endnote, but it is getting pretty close. The perfect environment would be Pages that can read and edit Adobe Acrobat files along with markup, comments and notes along with full Endnote functionality that would also run on a tablet that takes advantage of gestures...
Obviously Apple Matters is going to have a bias towards OS X and that should be taken into account. However, that said we've been reducing both our Windows and Linux systems in favor of OS X for some time now for many of the reasons outlined in the referenced article.
I'd like to add in another reason why Linux is not growing as fast as OS X use: fragmented distros. Supporting multiple flavors of Linux is simply a pain in the ass and the typical end user of Linux is likely to have their own preference (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc...etc...etc... In fact, last time I looked there were over 1000 different flavors of Linux and BSD and with the exception of OS X (a descendent of BSD) every single flavor that I've tried out of that 1000 all required significant effort just to get the OS up and running with wireless networks, not to mention all the various voodoo required for the printer support.
No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux. In retrospect, the last project that we worked on with a contractor got developed for Red Hat and in terms of system support, backup, management and more I really wish we had developed it for OS X now. That is not to say that we will not develop our algorithms cross platform, as that is our goal to release them totally open source, but for anything that is going to be developed for intensive use or for further development it is going on OS X and taking advantage of all the platform specific pleasantries such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation, Quartz and more.
Thanks and Leicester is a great town. We took the cab simply out of convenience for our hosts. Door to door service was a bit more expensive, but ultimately convenient. I wished to have a bit more time to explore some of the Roman ruins and sample some more Indian food which seemed better than it was in London.
Ah, but you see I am looking *down* the road a little bit and now where we are currently at. Congratulations to your family on their current or future academic accomplishments, but you have to know that the statements that I made are based on factual conditions of funding from both the NIH and the NSF whose budgets have not even kept up with inflation.
but as a college graduate in engineering from (early in) that time frame,
You might have picked the right field for short term gains.
with younger siblings (my youngest is 11 years my junior) interested in education/scientific fields:
Things may be fixed by the time your siblings are interested, but it will take at least a decade to fix the damage that has been done to science and science funding over the past several years. In the early 90s we spent much effort funding science and education and encouraging students to go into these fields, only to pull the rug out from underneath them when it came time to have them get started becoming independent scientsts. I've been fortunate in terms of funding and worked hard to maintain our position, but many junior (and senior) scientists are very worried about their funding.
one brother a pilot with a BS,
Then both you and he should know what a mess our current domestic airline industry is and unless he is a pilot for Delta, he is not doing nearly as well as he used to before the airlines had to deal with the increased costs of security, delays due to insufficient infrastructure, fuel costs that have tripled, etc...etc...etc...
one becoming a teacher,
God bless them for going into such a low paying career. I briefly attempted teaching junior high school before returning to graduate school when I realized that even as little as a graduate student makes, it was still more than what a teacher makes. If we truly placed a value on our teachers, we would not have the lack of commitment to the profession in terms of requirements for standards and low pay.
my sister studying to be a medical doctor
I am a principal in a medical clinic where we have about a dozen docs, our own MRI and CT scanners and about 100 total employees. On top of that, I teach medical students and am involved in the selection of medical students at my university. I think that I can say with some authority that medicine in this country has changed and not for the better. Even worse, we have not made any progress over the last few years on fixing any of the inherent problems with providing medical services in this country and in fact, have accelerated the damage being done by further limiting our options. Your sister is heading into a profession that is horribly broken in the US and is in need or a dramatic overhaul. Hopefully she can be a part of the solution...
Hey, in fact, we are in such desperate need of physicians if you know a neurologist or a cardiologist that wants to joint our practice, send them my way. If we hire them, I'll cut you a check on the spot for $10,000. I am serious. There are rural places in this country where physicians are simply, almost impossible to find.
and my youngest brother still in high school, but very into science
Cool. As one in science, I would very much like to encourage him. But we need to fix things to enable us to continue to stay a leader.
- I'd have to disagree. I could go on and on...
Because we live in a (mostly) free country, that of course is your prerogative. But ask anyone in the trenches of science and education and they would have to be honest with you and say how things are. From this scientists/educators perspective, we need to change our approach.
I have really been impressed with the level of commitment to science, research and education outside of the US right now and efforts like HECToR only consolidate that impression. While we here in the US have essentially dropped the ball on education and science funding for the past oh, six or seven years, the rest of the world is really stepping up. Of course I have mixed feelings about this as I am a US citizen who works in science and education, but it is also good to see other countries stepping up. For instance, a few months ago, I visited the University of Leicester and was truly impressed with the focus and quality of the research going on in the UK. Their commitment to bioscience funding is something that the US government should be very careful about as we stand to lose some valuable talent overseas if we are not careful...
Image search is currently one of the hottest areas of research with a variety of folks from the search engine companies to defense related applications to commercial aggregators of images like Getty. Certainly an understanding of how the retina and cortex process information could be helpful to efforts such as these as we have not yet found algorithms that are as good as people in finding interesting data within images. This is why after years and years, groups and agencies that process lots of image data still have to rely on analysts to quantify and classify data. However, that said there are some new approaches to image classification including clustering, level set theory and others that have real promise.
It looks like someone has forgotten the links to the referenced pdf. You can find Barry Wellman's publications including content about Networked Individualism here.
My initial thoughts on this were "bah, people spend too much time online", then I caught myself realizing that in the aggregate, I have resources spread all over a number of services from the personal personal to the professional with various sites from scientific ones to educational ones to time wasters like Slashdot;-)
I even started exploring a couple of social aggregators last year to explore options for consolidating effort and one of the most promising I've seen is Lijit. The premise behind their product is that people tend to look for answers from others they know or trust, yet current search engines (even the almighty Google) do not provide any sort of framework for trust inside social networks you are familiar with. Lijit provides for this intimacy of information allowing you and others to search not only information in your blog, but also information from posts that colleagues, friends and family have perhaps written when you are looking for information from sources that *you* know and trust. It is an approach that certainly has benefits in the social networking arenas, but I also find the potential for business and academics to be very exciting. The only question in my mind is how to exploit different services hosted on a variety of platforms to make the content indexable, but since text strings lend themselves to this quite nicely, the next problem is alternative data sources like image data, sound data, video, etc...etc...etc...
Years ago I was asked to join a group doing government work in exploring drugs related to sleep replacement or to maintain alertness in certain groups of people. This sort of stuff made me uncomfortable then and it still gives me the creeps.
The question for me always is whether or not the drug can *replace* sleep and all of its critical physiological functions. Sleep is a complex phenomenon with very specific architectures that helps maintain learning, performance, sanity and literature suggests more far reaching benefits from regular sleep. Lots of drugs can make the brain look "awake" including amphetamines and modafinil, itself widely used by people to maintain activities in the face of sleep needs. However, there are long term biological implications for not allowing one to invoke sleep including poor long term performance on learning and memory and there is some literature that suggests cardiovascular implications as well as other problems. Now, while the adverse effects of amphetamines are well known, they have been used for at least 60 years. On the other hand, drugs like modafinil are very recent and you may be shocked to find out just how many physicians, pilots, military personnel, truck drivers and housewives are currently taking modafinil to maintain alertness in the face of lack of sleep.
And as usual, there is no explanation as to *why* lithium batteries are now illegal to carry. I assume this is to reduce the possibility of a lithium battery shorting out, but if the batteries are contained in their shipping packages, they should be no more dangerous than many other items that you can carry on planes. This of course means a whole new hassle for those folks that use lithium batteries for their work such as photographers who need to travel by air to many of their assignments among many other folks and carry with them batteries to sometimes remote locations. What is the rationale? Have they examined the potential impact before coming up with yet another new restriction on travel? Are they worried about this as a terrorist act? Because, look, if someone really wants to bring down a plane, there are many ways to do it even without using lithium batteries. Think sodium metal or any explosive really, that is keister stashed until the terrorist gets to the lavatory. Think any common item on a plane that can be used as a weapon including newspaper, components of the interior finish and cabin materials,
Every time I come back into my own country after spending time abroad, I am frustrated and depressed over how bad things are getting here. I talked about some of it including the marketing problem we are manufacturing for ourselves here after my last trip to Japan.
It also makes one wonder how much all this is costing the US in terms of lost business, lost productivity, airline delays, increased cost burdens on airlines and passengers and more... And this is all being done in the name of safety and terrorism, but you know... it's funny because I remember flying back in the 70's and 80's where people routinely carried firearms on planes. The restriction was that they had to be long guns and unloaded. I even remember one Texan getting on a plane and commenting to his friend that he would never check his shotgun because it might get damaged by the baggage handlers. I also routinely used to carry a pocket knife with me wherever I went even up to a few years ago on planes before they were outlawed... which leads me to wonder if the per capita risk of hijacking is any different now versus what it was back then.
You act like funding is a god-given right to scientists.
Hardly. However, if we are to maintain our position as a world leader, then we need to invest in research, education and development. The US got to where it is by investing big time in education (G.I. Bill and others) and science and research (NSF, NIH and others). Oh and by the way, you are sounding like one of those ignorant asses that tells a cop, "Hey, I pay your salary". Mind you that the cop and I pay our taxes as well and you are likely benefitting from tax dollars as well. Public education? Arts? Internet? etc...etc...etc...
Don't get me wrong, I would like to see our scientists get ample funding so we can become a more efficient world with flying cars, fiberporn-to-the-desktop, and monkey butlers (one at first).
Ah...... you are losing credibility here...
But please don't think that scientists are someone "entitled" to tax-payer money. If a majority or even plurality of tax-payers would like science to get money, only THEN should it be the case. Wars too. (:
Society only benefits from education and research and have voted year after year to support science as the vast majority of Americans realize its benefits.
Yeah, now if we can just fix the NIH funding problem. We've gone years now completely ignoring biomedical research in this country. Back in 1998, scientists seeking funding had a 21% chance of getting funded on their first try and because of funding shortfalls among other reasons that chance fell to 8% in 2006.
Young scientists are absolutely struggling to launch their careers while senior scientists are worried about losing their funding and all of us are spending more time trying to look for money and apply for grants than we are spending time actually doing the science. All of this talk about open sourcing the science is great, but unless there is funding to actually do the science, it will all be for naught. The really scary thing is that I don't see any real fix in the near future. There has been so much damage done to the federal budget over the last six years or so that even if we started to fix the NIH budget tomorrow, it will likely take 5-10 years to rectify some of the problems and with the spending going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sub-prime problem, potential economic recession and more leaves very little room to move.
Mostly it is just static html, though one of them functions as an application server. The heavy lifting is done by the Mac Pros that are actually quieter than the Xserves, thus my interest in them. However, you are absolutely correct that proper caching and a gigabit connection can be done by lots of hardware, but for my purposes when I had to have servers in my office, the Mac Mini with its almost silent sound signature, very low heat generation and small size were the way to go. The Xserves live in a proper server environment where people do not have to coexist.
Hey, as Internet servers, those little Mac Mini's with on board gigabit ethernet are capable of more than you might imagine with one currently serving upwards of 45,000 graphics intensive pages a day.
It makes one wonder about the concept of graffit... The process (usually illegal) of drawing symbols, images or words on private or public surfaces without permission. This really, is the process of using sonic graffiti that I can imagine would be readily open to hacking, sonic tagging and sonic vandalism. Of course this opens up all sorts of questions as well: What sorts of messages are appropriate to beam into someone's awareness? What about inappropriate messages? How about unintended consequences when someone with paranoid schizophrenia encounters these messages? What are the legal implications if someone else targets the same area with a different sonic message than the one intended by the advertiser?
Personally, I find this advertising practice offensive and a little ignorant of where the possibilities may lead to. Furthermore, I am disappointed that A&E television would engage in this sort of thing, but A&E has been sliding down the slippery slope into crass, base appeal lately, attempting to go for shock factor at the expense of cultural sophistication. Back on topic: Would the advertiser consider it offensive if their message was sonically blocked via interfering sound waves? Would they consider someone else beaming messages into the same "acoustic space" unfair competition? Would they consider it vandalism? What are the liabilities if in the very unlikely possibility, a paranoid schizophrenic were to become violent in response to such messages? (note: only a very small percentage of paranoid schizophrenic patients are outwardly violent)
If I lived in NYC, this would be a call to me for a little social experimentation with A&Es advertising campaign. But beyond that, think about the possibilities for social filtering, or even the surreptitious delivery of information, allowing the legal (or illegal) routing of people, goods and supplies via temporally discrete windows of sonic delivery.
Those images do not look like images representative of cloned GFP containing animals that I have seen. Rather the green cat look slike the image was taken through a green filter or filtered light and the cat on the left simply looks illuminated by a laser. Whether or not these animals truly represent transgenic fluorescent animals from these images at least leaves me suspicious...
Some music is unavailable in any other format, thus why I on occasion still purchase music on CD. However, over the past seven years or so, more and more of my purchases have been direct to the indy label or the artist.
OK, here is the deal... I just bought over $200 worth of music on CD and I absolutely guarantee that this will be the last music purchase I make from any RIAA backed artist unless they start recognizing fair use. In fact, in the MGM vs Grokster case, the RIAA suggested that iPods have a substantial and legitimate commercial use in contrast to Grokster.
This case appears to be an absolutely clear fair use case. This individual, like hundreds of thousands of others *purchase* music from legal sources and while I just spent the last ten minutes typing out an explanation for why this may be the case, I have realized that we've all heard this ad nauseum. What is it going to take for the shareholders of all these companies to stand up and say enough? What is it going to take before all consumers simply say "enough of this hassle, no more music purchases?" What is it going to take before these people wake up, realize that they need to stop treating their paying customers like criminals? When are they going to realize that rather than litigate against the pirates, they should simply realize that they should compete against them by offering great service for reasonable prices and get rid of all the DRM? There is a reason that music sales are dropping (actually a dozen or so), but if the RIAA and their associated represented companies simply started going back to basics, finding and promoting good talent (there is lots out there) rather than promoting the engineered bands, or what they think should be popular, they could go back to making money. Look, Long Tail economics gives them everything they need to start making more money, even from music in the public domain. Hey, I'd buy music if made available from a huge variety of artists that are currently out of print or have entered the public domain, but are no longer available.
Yeah, I was punching holes in floppy disks myself for personal use. But was also doing some database stuff (Visicalc) for some of the faculty members at the local medical school and they paid for the hard drive. I just specced it which was pretty cool for a then 12 year old.
Slashdot Mirror
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Oh Pages does make beautiful PDFs, no doubt. OS X actually has the PDF engine and Pages just calls it to my understanding.
However, what Pages does not do is deal with all the features of PDFs including forms, markup and more.
Been there, done that. TeX/LaTeX is nice and cross platform, but for real page layout, you should really try Pages...
Well, I started using Pages back in February of 2005, so I guess Microsoft had something to emulate for at least a couple of years. :-)
.doc files to be only compatible with the new Office 2007, essentially forcing users to upgrade and make the purchase. That irritated me considerably and if I did not have a backup to recover everything, I would have been really upset. However, since I've been moving most of our systems to OS X from Windows and Linux, it has not been an issue, and Pages is so much nicer... Though I'll carefully give the new Mac Version of Office 2008 a try when it is finalized.
Admittedly, I've not used Office 2007 much because of an initial attempt at using the trial version corrupted *all* of my
The problem with Word and notably Microsoft, is that they have attempted to make both Windows and their apps, notably Office, all things to all people with an interface that has not really changed at all over the course of its lifetime.
I used to think that the reality of the situation was that you really could not have a professional class word processing application that does all things that professional writers need used by the same audience that merely wants to write school reports or letters to friends. However, it is all in the interface and Pages from Apple has shown that many of the "professional" features in word processing have to do with page layout or formatting issues as well as integrating not just text and fonts, but also images. Fundamentally the issue with interfaces is not providing features piled on features, but figuring out how to craft a tool that people can use to get work done rather than having to learn how to use the tool. I want my word processing environment to simply let me craft written word and images into a form that allows me to communicate my intent to the audience without getting in the way or making me learn arcane and occult methods for getting my page numbers to appear just right or getting the text to wrap around an embedded image without constantly having to reformat an entire 80 (or more) page document. Writing my doctoral dissertation in Word back in 2003 was a repeated lesson in pain as every time I changed a single image, the formatting of the entire document would be altered with entire paragraphs seeming to disappear or get hidden outside of margins and I never want to return to that world.
Granted, I still have to return to Word from time to time as Pages is not yet perfect, still needing better integration with Endnote, but it is getting pretty close. The perfect environment would be Pages that can read and edit Adobe Acrobat files along with markup, comments and notes along with full Endnote functionality that would also run on a tablet that takes advantage of gestures...
Obviously Apple Matters is going to have a bias towards OS X and that should be taken into account. However, that said we've been reducing both our Windows and Linux systems in favor of OS X for some time now for many of the reasons outlined in the referenced article.
I'd like to add in another reason why Linux is not growing as fast as OS X use: fragmented distros. Supporting multiple flavors of Linux is simply a pain in the ass and the typical end user of Linux is likely to have their own preference (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc...etc...etc... In fact, last time I looked there were over 1000 different flavors of Linux and BSD and with the exception of OS X (a descendent of BSD) every single flavor that I've tried out of that 1000 all required significant effort just to get the OS up and running with wireless networks, not to mention all the various voodoo required for the printer support.
No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux. In retrospect, the last project that we worked on with a contractor got developed for Red Hat and in terms of system support, backup, management and more I really wish we had developed it for OS X now. That is not to say that we will not develop our algorithms cross platform, as that is our goal to release them totally open source, but for anything that is going to be developed for intensive use or for further development it is going on OS X and taking advantage of all the platform specific pleasantries such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation, Quartz and more.
Thanks and Leicester is a great town. We took the cab simply out of convenience for our hosts. Door to door service was a bit more expensive, but ultimately convenient. I wished to have a bit more time to explore some of the Roman ruins and sample some more Indian food which seemed better than it was in London.
Ah, but you see I am looking *down* the road a little bit and now where we are currently at. Congratulations to your family on their current or future academic accomplishments, but you have to know that the statements that I made are based on factual conditions of funding from both the NIH and the NSF whose budgets have not even kept up with inflation.
...
but as a college graduate in engineering from (early in) that time frame,
You might have picked the right field for short term gains.
with younger siblings (my youngest is 11 years my junior) interested in education/scientific fields:
Things may be fixed by the time your siblings are interested, but it will take at least a decade to fix the damage that has been done to science and science funding over the past several years. In the early 90s we spent much effort funding science and education and encouraging students to go into these fields, only to pull the rug out from underneath them when it came time to have them get started becoming independent scientsts. I've been fortunate in terms of funding and worked hard to maintain our position, but many junior (and senior) scientists are very worried about their funding.
one brother a pilot with a BS,
Then both you and he should know what a mess our current domestic airline industry is and unless he is a pilot for Delta, he is not doing nearly as well as he used to before the airlines had to deal with the increased costs of security, delays due to insufficient infrastructure, fuel costs that have tripled, etc...etc...etc...
one becoming a teacher,
God bless them for going into such a low paying career. I briefly attempted teaching junior high school before returning to graduate school when I realized that even as little as a graduate student makes, it was still more than what a teacher makes. If we truly placed a value on our teachers, we would not have the lack of commitment to the profession in terms of requirements for standards and low pay.
my sister studying to be a medical doctor
I am a principal in a medical clinic where we have about a dozen docs, our own MRI and CT scanners and about 100 total employees. On top of that, I teach medical students and am involved in the selection of medical students at my university. I think that I can say with some authority that medicine in this country has changed and not for the better. Even worse, we have not made any progress over the last few years on fixing any of the inherent problems with providing medical services in this country and in fact, have accelerated the damage being done by further limiting our options. Your sister is heading into a profession that is horribly broken in the US and is in need or a dramatic overhaul. Hopefully she can be a part of the solution...
Hey, in fact, we are in such desperate need of physicians if you know a neurologist or a cardiologist that wants to joint our practice, send them my way. If we hire them, I'll cut you a check on the spot for $10,000. I am serious. There are rural places in this country where physicians are simply, almost impossible to find.
and my youngest brother still in high school, but very into science
Cool. As one in science, I would very much like to encourage him. But we need to fix things to enable us to continue to stay a leader.
- I'd have to disagree. I could go on and on
Because we live in a (mostly) free country, that of course is your prerogative. But ask anyone in the trenches of science and education and they would have to be honest with you and say how things are. From this scientists/educators perspective, we need to change our approach.
I have really been impressed with the level of commitment to science, research and education outside of the US right now and efforts like HECToR only consolidate that impression. While we here in the US have essentially dropped the ball on education and science funding for the past oh, six or seven years, the rest of the world is really stepping up. Of course I have mixed feelings about this as I am a US citizen who works in science and education, but it is also good to see other countries stepping up. For instance, a few months ago, I visited the University of Leicester and was truly impressed with the focus and quality of the research going on in the UK. Their commitment to bioscience funding is something that the US government should be very careful about as we stand to lose some valuable talent overseas if we are not careful...
Image search is currently one of the hottest areas of research with a variety of folks from the search engine companies to defense related applications to commercial aggregators of images like Getty. Certainly an understanding of how the retina and cortex process information could be helpful to efforts such as these as we have not yet found algorithms that are as good as people in finding interesting data within images. This is why after years and years, groups and agencies that process lots of image data still have to rely on analysts to quantify and classify data. However, that said there are some new approaches to image classification including clustering, level set theory and others that have real promise.
It looks like someone has forgotten the links to the referenced pdf. You can find Barry Wellman's publications including content about Networked Individualism here.
My initial thoughts on this were "bah, people spend too much time online", then I caught myself realizing that in the aggregate, I have resources spread all over a number of services from the personal personal to the professional with various sites from scientific ones to educational ones to time wasters like Slashdot ;-)
I even started exploring a couple of social aggregators last year to explore options for consolidating effort and one of the most promising I've seen is Lijit. The premise behind their product is that people tend to look for answers from others they know or trust, yet current search engines (even the almighty Google) do not provide any sort of framework for trust inside social networks you are familiar with. Lijit provides for this intimacy of information allowing you and others to search not only information in your blog, but also information from posts that colleagues, friends and family have perhaps written when you are looking for information from sources that *you* know and trust. It is an approach that certainly has benefits in the social networking arenas, but I also find the potential for business and academics to be very exciting. The only question in my mind is how to exploit different services hosted on a variety of platforms to make the content indexable, but since text strings lend themselves to this quite nicely, the next problem is alternative data sources like image data, sound data, video, etc...etc...etc...
Years ago I was asked to join a group doing government work in exploring drugs related to sleep replacement or to maintain alertness in certain groups of people. This sort of stuff made me uncomfortable then and it still gives me the creeps.
The question for me always is whether or not the drug can *replace* sleep and all of its critical physiological functions. Sleep is a complex phenomenon with very specific architectures that helps maintain learning, performance, sanity and literature suggests more far reaching benefits from regular sleep. Lots of drugs can make the brain look "awake" including amphetamines and modafinil, itself widely used by people to maintain activities in the face of sleep needs. However, there are long term biological implications for not allowing one to invoke sleep including poor long term performance on learning and memory and there is some literature that suggests cardiovascular implications as well as other problems. Now, while the adverse effects of amphetamines are well known, they have been used for at least 60 years. On the other hand, drugs like modafinil are very recent and you may be shocked to find out just how many physicians, pilots, military personnel, truck drivers and housewives are currently taking modafinil to maintain alertness in the face of lack of sleep.
And as usual, there is no explanation as to *why* lithium batteries are now illegal to carry. I assume this is to reduce the possibility of a lithium battery shorting out, but if the batteries are contained in their shipping packages, they should be no more dangerous than many other items that you can carry on planes. This of course means a whole new hassle for those folks that use lithium batteries for their work such as photographers who need to travel by air to many of their assignments among many other folks and carry with them batteries to sometimes remote locations. What is the rationale? Have they examined the potential impact before coming up with yet another new restriction on travel? Are they worried about this as a terrorist act? Because, look, if someone really wants to bring down a plane, there are many ways to do it even without using lithium batteries. Think sodium metal or any explosive really, that is keister stashed until the terrorist gets to the lavatory. Think any common item on a plane that can be used as a weapon including newspaper, components of the interior finish and cabin materials,
Every time I come back into my own country after spending time abroad, I am frustrated and depressed over how bad things are getting here. I talked about some of it including the marketing problem we are manufacturing for ourselves here after my last trip to Japan.
It also makes one wonder how much all this is costing the US in terms of lost business, lost productivity, airline delays, increased cost burdens on airlines and passengers and more... And this is all being done in the name of safety and terrorism, but you know... it's funny because I remember flying back in the 70's and 80's where people routinely carried firearms on planes. The restriction was that they had to be long guns and unloaded. I even remember one Texan getting on a plane and commenting to his friend that he would never check his shotgun because it might get damaged by the baggage handlers. I also routinely used to carry a pocket knife with me wherever I went even up to a few years ago on planes before they were outlawed... which leads me to wonder if the per capita risk of hijacking is any different now versus what it was back then.
You act like funding is a god-given right to scientists.
Hardly. However, if we are to maintain our position as a world leader, then we need to invest in research, education and development. The US got to where it is by investing big time in education (G.I. Bill and others) and science and research (NSF, NIH and others). Oh and by the way, you are sounding like one of those ignorant asses that tells a cop, "Hey, I pay your salary". Mind you that the cop and I pay our taxes as well and you are likely benefitting from tax dollars as well. Public education? Arts? Internet? etc...etc...etc...
Don't get me wrong, I would like to see our scientists get ample funding so we can become a more efficient world with flying cars, fiberporn-to-the-desktop, and monkey butlers (one at first).
Ah...... you are losing credibility here...
But please don't think that scientists are someone "entitled" to tax-payer money. If a majority or even plurality of tax-payers would like science to get money, only THEN should it be the case. Wars too. (:
Society only benefits from education and research and have voted year after year to support science as the vast majority of Americans realize its benefits.
Yeah, now if we can just fix the NIH funding problem. We've gone years now completely ignoring biomedical research in this country. Back in 1998, scientists seeking funding had a 21% chance of getting funded on their first try and because of funding shortfalls among other reasons that chance fell to 8% in 2006.
Young scientists are absolutely struggling to launch their careers while senior scientists are worried about losing their funding and all of us are spending more time trying to look for money and apply for grants than we are spending time actually doing the science. All of this talk about open sourcing the science is great, but unless there is funding to actually do the science, it will all be for naught. The really scary thing is that I don't see any real fix in the near future. There has been so much damage done to the federal budget over the last six years or so that even if we started to fix the NIH budget tomorrow, it will likely take 5-10 years to rectify some of the problems and with the spending going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sub-prime problem, potential economic recession and more leaves very little room to move.
Mostly it is just static html, though one of them functions as an application server. The heavy lifting is done by the Mac Pros that are actually quieter than the Xserves, thus my interest in them. However, you are absolutely correct that proper caching and a gigabit connection can be done by lots of hardware, but for my purposes when I had to have servers in my office, the Mac Mini with its almost silent sound signature, very low heat generation and small size were the way to go. The Xserves live in a proper server environment where people do not have to coexist.
Hey, as Internet servers, those little Mac Mini's with on board gigabit ethernet are capable of more than you might imagine with one currently serving upwards of 45,000 graphics intensive pages a day.
I've got my dream office here.
Mac Mini's and Mac Pro's for servers make for quiet work.
It makes one wonder about the concept of graffit... The process (usually illegal) of drawing symbols, images or words on private or public surfaces without permission. This really, is the process of using sonic graffiti that I can imagine would be readily open to hacking, sonic tagging and sonic vandalism. Of course this opens up all sorts of questions as well: What sorts of messages are appropriate to beam into someone's awareness? What about inappropriate messages? How about unintended consequences when someone with paranoid schizophrenia encounters these messages? What are the legal implications if someone else targets the same area with a different sonic message than the one intended by the advertiser?
Personally, I find this advertising practice offensive and a little ignorant of where the possibilities may lead to. Furthermore, I am disappointed that A&E television would engage in this sort of thing, but A&E has been sliding down the slippery slope into crass, base appeal lately, attempting to go for shock factor at the expense of cultural sophistication. Back on topic: Would the advertiser consider it offensive if their message was sonically blocked via interfering sound waves? Would they consider someone else beaming messages into the same "acoustic space" unfair competition? Would they consider it vandalism? What are the liabilities if in the very unlikely possibility, a paranoid schizophrenic were to become violent in response to such messages? (note: only a very small percentage of paranoid schizophrenic patients are outwardly violent)
If I lived in NYC, this would be a call to me for a little social experimentation with A&Es advertising campaign. But beyond that, think about the possibilities for social filtering, or even the surreptitious delivery of information, allowing the legal (or illegal) routing of people, goods and supplies via temporally discrete windows of sonic delivery.
Sorry, did not read carefully enough... The cat on the right *is* a normal cat imaged through a green light filter as claimed.
Those images do not look like images representative of cloned GFP containing animals that I have seen. Rather the green cat look slike the image was taken through a green filter or filtered light and the cat on the left simply looks illuminated by a laser. Whether or not these animals truly represent transgenic fluorescent animals from these images at least leaves me suspicious...
Some music is unavailable in any other format, thus why I on occasion still purchase music on CD. However, over the past seven years or so, more and more of my purchases have been direct to the indy label or the artist.
OK, here is the deal... I just bought over $200 worth of music on CD and I absolutely guarantee that this will be the last music purchase I make from any RIAA backed artist unless they start recognizing fair use. In fact, in the MGM vs Grokster case, the RIAA suggested that iPods have a substantial and legitimate commercial use in contrast to Grokster.
This case appears to be an absolutely clear fair use case. This individual, like hundreds of thousands of others *purchase* music from legal sources and while I just spent the last ten minutes typing out an explanation for why this may be the case, I have realized that we've all heard this ad nauseum. What is it going to take for the shareholders of all these companies to stand up and say enough? What is it going to take before all consumers simply say "enough of this hassle, no more music purchases?" What is it going to take before these people wake up, realize that they need to stop treating their paying customers like criminals? When are they going to realize that rather than litigate against the pirates, they should simply realize that they should compete against them by offering great service for reasonable prices and get rid of all the DRM? There is a reason that music sales are dropping (actually a dozen or so), but if the RIAA and their associated represented companies simply started going back to basics, finding and promoting good talent (there is lots out there) rather than promoting the engineered bands, or what they think should be popular, they could go back to making money. Look, Long Tail economics gives them everything they need to start making more money, even from music in the public domain. Hey, I'd buy music if made available from a huge variety of artists that are currently out of print or have entered the public domain, but are no longer available.
Yeah, I was punching holes in floppy disks myself for personal use. But was also doing some database stuff (Visicalc) for some of the faculty members at the local medical school and they paid for the hard drive. I just specced it which was pretty cool for a then 12 year old.