IAAB (I am a biologist). From what I've learned, what allows cancer cells to divide indefinitely is that there are mutations in the proteins that control the cell cycle. Normally, there are proteins that inhibit the cell from continual division. However, in many cases, these proteins are mutated and can no longer perform their functions allowing the cancer cell to divide indefinitely. Unfortunately, they are not all the same. There can be several causes to why they behave like cancer cells. Mutations in these proteins are only one cause.
The cancer cells are still the same type of cell they were before they became cancerous. For example, in skin cancer, the cancerous cells are still skin cells. This has been noted when metastasis occurs.
Largely what makes organisms different is what genes are expressed. That is, what genes are turned in to make proteins. That's even what makes cells different. There isn't a genetic different between your liver cells and your heart cells (yes, there could be mutations). The real difference is in what proteins are expressed.
That's not entirely true. That assumes that the DNA codons are used with equal frequency, which is almost never the case. Different organisms have different biases in the way that they use the codons. Within an organism, there can be biases in the different regions (coding vs. noncoding) of the DNA.
Several people have already pointed out that the Nintendo Revolution or the GameCube might be a better choice based on the games. I'm inclined to agree. Another reason that it's a better choice is based on the size of the controllers. The GameCube controllers are much smaller than the PS2 controllers and are a lot more intuitive to use. Also, the "A" button is the primary button for most games, so it's actually bigger than the rest of the buttons. This makes it a lot easier for younger kids to learn to use them.
I don't know of any other life forms based on PNA. There are some infections diseases (mad-cow disease being the most famous) that have prions - basically self-replicating proteins - instead of DNA or RNA. I'm not sure if PNA acts more like a prion or more like DNA.
GenCon was originally in Lake Geneva, WI because that's where Gary Gygax lived. It got too big for Lake Geneva, so it moved to Milwaukee, WI. It was held in a couple of different convention centers in Milwaukee before it moved to Indianapolis, IN a few years ago. Now, it is held about the same weekend every year in Indy. There is also a GenCon SoCal (Southern California).
Being a Henrico county resident, I tried to go to the iBook sale this morning. I have younger siblings who could use a computer and this was a pretty good deal for that.
I got to the Richmond International Raceway where the sale was held at 6:55. It was pretty obvious to me that there was no way I was getting a laptop based on the number of cars trying to get in and the number of people lining up outside. So I left. The police were doing their best to try to keep the siutation under control, but you could tell that it was rapidly getting out of hand just because there were too many people. Driving back home, I think there was at least a good mile or two of cars still trying to get into the sale. I can't imagine how long those people ended up sitting there.
I'm not sure why more people didn't just decide to leave when the saw the number of people there. I'm also not sure why the county didn't make the price higher. Having it at $100 - $200 would have made a lot of money back for the county and would have discouraged a lot of people. This has to be a net loss in profit for them based on the number of police officers that were there. It could have been handled much better.
Rumor has it that there may be more laptops laying around (they did give one to every high school student in the county and only sold 1000). Hopefully, they are smarter next time. I guess at least I know where my tax money is being spent...
It seems to me that what the article is talking about is expression of genes in normal cells. (Note, I didn't read the article because of the whole subscription thing, although I have heard some discussion of this.) Personally, I was always taught that an individual's genes could change via mutation. Mutations in the genes that regulate cell cycles, for example, can cause cancer.
Inheritance is a separate issue, though. The genes for your children are controlled by the genes in eggs or sperm. These are separate from the genes that are expressed in your cells on a day to day basis. In order for inheritance to be changed, the environment has to act on those cells.
From what I've heard, I don't know that this will change much in terms of the return of Lamarckian inheritance. I'm definitely interested to hear others thoughts on the subject.
current software patent situation punishes producing and rewards parasiting
While this may be true, many software companies are aware of this. The one that I used to work for actively encouraged people to submit ideas that could potentially become incorporated into the software to the patent department. They didn't have to have all of the details worked out, just an idea. The rationale was that the company would be protected from other people patenting something that should be in the software. A lot of patents were taken out on things that never actually made it into the software.
Is that an abuse of the patent system? Probably. From a business standpoint, though, it's probably the right decision. Software companies don't want their development to be hindered by other patents out there and they don't want to have to take cases to court.
But the most exciting field in this century is going to be biology and its applications.
I would say that one of the most exciting fields in this century is actually going to be Bioinformatics (disclaimer: I'm currently getting a degree in bioinformatics). It's not enough any more for someone to have a degree in Biology. It's much more useful if you have a degree in Biology and some programming skills. Most fields in Biology have so much information to go through (like DNA or protein sequences) that it's becoming almost a necessity to have the ability to write programs to do what you want.
What I think you are getting at is why kudzu is a problem if wild ecologies are able to adapt.
The problem with invasive species is that they have no natural preditors in their new environments. There are the normal things you would think of, for example (disclaimer: I don't know if this is true. It's merely an example), no animal in the American South eats kudzu. But, there are also a large amount of parasites that can keep a natural species in check. When an invasive species moves in, they don't bring all of their parasites with them. The parasites are often mostly responsible for things like growth limitation and the like. Without them, you can have giant kudzu in the new environment.
Any natural environment is fairly carefully balanced with the species that inhabit it: plants, animals, parasites, bacteria, etc. If you shift any of these slightly, whether through pollution, new species, etc., and everything can get thrown off.
I had a similar experience. I deal with lots of data and having to graph them. This is very difficult in OpenOffice (I'm using OO for Mac). The graphing capabilities just aren't there. They are difficult to set up, in terms of data selection, and creating linear regression lines.
I'm not sure how much students will be using graphing functions, but it is incredibly frustrating to use it in OpenOffice.
Biology is kind of a strange field. There is a lot of money out there.
I'm currently in grad school for Bioinformatics, so I see Biology incorporating many aspects from CS (at least that's part of the hope for the people I work with). As biologists are doing more bioinformatics research, they also have large data sets, huge images, algorithms, and even open source software that they can't include in their paper. A lot of them set up a web page for each paper where you can go to download their data sets, programs, etc.
It works out pretty well (IMO) as you are able to be published in large, well-known journals, but also give people access to more information if they want it.
The really sad thing is that scientists are not allowed to do research on embryos, which has created our current method of doing IVF. Basically, lots of embryos are created and several (4-5) are implanted in the woman. The nonimplanted embryos get frozen.
Here are some problems:
1) If we could do research on embryos, we could have a more effective method for doing IVF. More people might get pregnant the first time instead of having to go back again and again.
2) Under the current IVF method, lots of extra embryos are created. They sit in freezers or just get thrown away depending on what the parents want. After a period of time, the frozen ones could never become a viable fetus. What do we do? Throw them away?
Are either of these things moral? If it's immoral (amoral?) to do embryonic stem cell research, isn't it also wrong to overproduce embryos - many of which will die? No one talks about the consequences of IVF. It seems acceptable to do IVF, even when throwing away embryos, because the net effect is that someone has a baby. Why can't someone have a baby and scientists get to do research on the ones that will get thrown away? Why is it so different to use embryos for research?
There is also a restriction on developing new lines of embryonic stem cells. While this sounds like a good compromise to a lot of people, consider that all of the existing stem cell lines were grown on mouse feeder cells. This means that all of the current lines of stem cells have some amount of mouse proteins in them. As such, they can't be used in human testing.
This is one of the biggest issues that gets left out of the discussions of Bush's stem cell research policies. I appreciate that research can be done, but right now that research can't really be used for anything.
If you RTFA, you'll notice that he is 18 now, not when he committed in 2003. He was 16 at the time, which makes him a minor. That makes him his parents' responsibility.
I can understand the opinion. Personally, I don't think that it would be particularly fun.
But, I don't deny that other people have a right to play the game. They absolutely do.
The problem here is that there are irresponsible parents out there who let their children play the games without knowing what is going on. I don't deny the right for parents to get information about the game and then choose to let their children play. But, I think the key is choice. Parents need to play an active role in deciding what's right for their kids. My parents did and I hated it at the time, but I absolutely understand why they did it now.
I have a very hard time with: (a) Parents not being informed in their childrens' lives. (b) The culture we live in that decides it's the videogame's fault and not the parents'.
Interestingly enough, there is discussion that it may not be possible to clone humans at this time. There have been "successful" clones of sheep, dogs, cats, and mice. I say "successful" because there is a very low percentage of living clones that come from current methods. However, as far as I know, no one has been able to clone a monkey or an ape even though many people have tried. We currently just don't seem to have the technology and the knowledge necessary to clone higher organisms.
On the one hand, this seems like a good idea. It holds the stores responsible for not enforcing the policies that they have in place - mainly fining them for selling (or renting) M-rated games to minors. Great, I guess.
On the other hand, I'm not really sure that this will fix the problem of uninformed parents buying and renting the games for their children. I don't have a problem with people deciding that it's ok that their child plays a game. I have a problem with parents not knowing what the game is and getting it for their kids because "my friend's mom said it's ok". That happens all the time. Are these parents going to be fined, too?
How do they avoid the common problem of fingerprint scanners: too stringent or too loose settings. If you set it too stringently, you get false negatives (rejecting people it should accept). In the other direction, you can get false positives.
I did an implementation at a hospital that used fingerprint scanners for the drugs in the unit. The nurses constantly complained that it wouldn't take their fingerprint when it should. This was partly due to settings and partly due to the scanner getting dirty and scratched.
I'd be interested to know how Thriftway is getting around those things.
If you go with the crickets, be sure to not buy them from your local pet store. Many of them buy wingless crickets so that when they are in your reptile cage they don't drive you crazy.
Personally, I think this is a great plan. Occassionally, I'll get crickets with wings on them. They generally last a few days before my gecko eats them and it drives the people in my house absolutely crazy.
I think that there is a pretty negative stigma attached to being a gamer. It's very difficult to overcome. I don't think a games award show (be it Spike's horrible monstrosity or otherwise) is going to help the situation. There are a lot of gamers who are good people. The first big example that comes to mind is the guys over at Penny Arcade who set up the Child's Play Charity - http://childsplaycharity.org/ - in response to the negative image of gamers in the media. I'm sure there are others, but that was the first that came to mind.
I think the biggest problem is not that there are violent videogames. The games are rated for a reason. If you don't want your child to play GTA, Hitman, Halo, etc., don't buy them. I used to work at Target as a cashier. As a cashier, you're supposed to check IDs for games rated M (must be 17 or older). I'd ask people for them and they would have no clue that the game was rated or what the game was even about. The problem is that people like scapegoats for the way our society is. Violent videogames and movies are easy targets. They are easier to make go away and "fix" things than actual fixes are.
If she has a 17" powerbook, she doesn't need to get a USB mouse and carry around extra cords, etc. Since the powerbooks come with built-in bluetooth, she can get a bluetooth mouse. No cords, no dongles.
As far as carpal tunnel, I'm not sure she's any less likely to get it from a mouse than from the glidepoint/typing. I have it and I just mouse off-handed when it acts up. I've also got one of those mouse pads with wrist rests in them. They make a big difference when you spend 10 hours on a computer a day.
And Gladiator's success can be traced to Braveheart, which, IMO, spawned this whole series of epic movies. Notice how they all have a speech by the person commanding the army right before the big battle like in Braveheart? It's getting tired and that's why movies like Alexander and Troy are failing.
The same thing is going to happen to the video game industry. Honestly, I can't tell the difference between the WWII games out right now as they all look the same. Why buy a game that looks/feels almost identical to a game that you've already played? It seems silly to me.
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IAAB (I am a biologist). From what I've learned, what allows cancer cells to divide indefinitely is that there are mutations in the proteins that control the cell cycle. Normally, there are proteins that inhibit the cell from continual division. However, in many cases, these proteins are mutated and can no longer perform their functions allowing the cancer cell to divide indefinitely. Unfortunately, they are not all the same. There can be several causes to why they behave like cancer cells. Mutations in these proteins are only one cause.
The cancer cells are still the same type of cell they were before they became cancerous. For example, in skin cancer, the cancerous cells are still skin cells. This has been noted when metastasis occurs.
Largely what makes organisms different is what genes are expressed. That is, what genes are turned in to make proteins. That's even what makes cells different. There isn't a genetic different between your liver cells and your heart cells (yes, there could be mutations). The real difference is in what proteins are expressed.
That's not entirely true. That assumes that the DNA codons are used with equal frequency, which is almost never the case. Different organisms have different biases in the way that they use the codons. Within an organism, there can be biases in the different regions (coding vs. noncoding) of the DNA.
Several people have already pointed out that the Nintendo Revolution or the GameCube might be a better choice based on the games. I'm inclined to agree. Another reason that it's a better choice is based on the size of the controllers. The GameCube controllers are much smaller than the PS2 controllers and are a lot more intuitive to use. Also, the "A" button is the primary button for most games, so it's actually bigger than the rest of the buttons. This makes it a lot easier for younger kids to learn to use them.
I don't know of any other life forms based on PNA. There are some infections diseases (mad-cow disease being the most famous) that have prions - basically self-replicating proteins - instead of DNA or RNA. I'm not sure if PNA acts more like a prion or more like DNA.
GenCon was originally in Lake Geneva, WI because that's where Gary Gygax lived. It got too big for Lake Geneva, so it moved to Milwaukee, WI. It was held in a couple of different convention centers in Milwaukee before it moved to Indianapolis, IN a few years ago. Now, it is held about the same weekend every year in Indy. There is also a GenCon SoCal (Southern California).
For more details, look here
Being a Henrico county resident, I tried to go to the iBook sale this morning. I have younger siblings who could use a computer and this was a pretty good deal for that.
I got to the Richmond International Raceway where the sale was held at 6:55. It was pretty obvious to me that there was no way I was getting a laptop based on the number of cars trying to get in and the number of people lining up outside. So I left. The police were doing their best to try to keep the siutation under control, but you could tell that it was rapidly getting out of hand just because there were too many people. Driving back home, I think there was at least a good mile or two of cars still trying to get into the sale. I can't imagine how long those people ended up sitting there.
I'm not sure why more people didn't just decide to leave when the saw the number of people there. I'm also not sure why the county didn't make the price higher. Having it at $100 - $200 would have made a lot of money back for the county and would have discouraged a lot of people. This has to be a net loss in profit for them based on the number of police officers that were there. It could have been handled much better.
Rumor has it that there may be more laptops laying around (they did give one to every high school student in the county and only sold 1000). Hopefully, they are smarter next time. I guess at least I know where my tax money is being spent...
It seems to me that what the article is talking about is expression of genes in normal cells. (Note, I didn't read the article because of the whole subscription thing, although I have heard some discussion of this.) Personally, I was always taught that an individual's genes could change via mutation. Mutations in the genes that regulate cell cycles, for example, can cause cancer.
Inheritance is a separate issue, though. The genes for your children are controlled by the genes in eggs or sperm. These are separate from the genes that are expressed in your cells on a day to day basis. In order for inheritance to be changed, the environment has to act on those cells.
From what I've heard, I don't know that this will change much in terms of the return of Lamarckian inheritance. I'm definitely interested to hear others thoughts on the subject.
current software patent situation punishes producing and rewards parasiting
While this may be true, many software companies are aware of this. The one that I used to work for actively encouraged people to submit ideas that could potentially become incorporated into the software to the patent department. They didn't have to have all of the details worked out, just an idea. The rationale was that the company would be protected from other people patenting something that should be in the software. A lot of patents were taken out on things that never actually made it into the software.
Is that an abuse of the patent system? Probably. From a business standpoint, though, it's probably the right decision. Software companies don't want their development to be hindered by other patents out there and they don't want to have to take cases to court.
But the most exciting field in this century is going to be biology and its applications.
I would say that one of the most exciting fields in this century is actually going to be Bioinformatics (disclaimer: I'm currently getting a degree in bioinformatics). It's not enough any more for someone to have a degree in Biology. It's much more useful if you have a degree in Biology and some programming skills. Most fields in Biology have so much information to go through (like DNA or protein sequences) that it's becoming almost a necessity to have the ability to write programs to do what you want.
Many pet stores sell crickets. I buy about a dozen per week for my gecko so that I don't have to deal with an entire case of crickets.
What I think you are getting at is why kudzu is a problem if wild ecologies are able to adapt.
The problem with invasive species is that they have no natural preditors in their new environments. There are the normal things you would think of, for example (disclaimer: I don't know if this is true. It's merely an example), no animal in the American South eats kudzu. But, there are also a large amount of parasites that can keep a natural species in check. When an invasive species moves in, they don't bring all of their parasites with them. The parasites are often mostly responsible for things like growth limitation and the like. Without them, you can have giant kudzu in the new environment.
Any natural environment is fairly carefully balanced with the species that inhabit it: plants, animals, parasites, bacteria, etc. If you shift any of these slightly, whether through pollution, new species, etc., and everything can get thrown off.
I had a similar experience. I deal with lots of data and having to graph them. This is very difficult in OpenOffice (I'm using OO for Mac). The graphing capabilities just aren't there. They are difficult to set up, in terms of data selection, and creating linear regression lines.
I'm not sure how much students will be using graphing functions, but it is incredibly frustrating to use it in OpenOffice.
Biology is kind of a strange field. There is a lot of money out there.
I'm currently in grad school for Bioinformatics, so I see Biology incorporating many aspects from CS (at least that's part of the hope for the people I work with). As biologists are doing more bioinformatics research, they also have large data sets, huge images, algorithms, and even open source software that they can't include in their paper. A lot of them set up a web page for each paper where you can go to download their data sets, programs, etc.
It works out pretty well (IMO) as you are able to be published in large, well-known journals, but also give people access to more information if they want it.
The really sad thing is that scientists are not allowed to do research on embryos, which has created our current method of doing IVF. Basically, lots of embryos are created and several (4-5) are implanted in the woman. The nonimplanted embryos get frozen.
Here are some problems:
1) If we could do research on embryos, we could have a more effective method for doing IVF. More people might get pregnant the first time instead of having to go back again and again.
2) Under the current IVF method, lots of extra embryos are created. They sit in freezers or just get thrown away depending on what the parents want. After a period of time, the frozen ones could never become a viable fetus. What do we do? Throw them away?
Are either of these things moral? If it's immoral (amoral?) to do embryonic stem cell research, isn't it also wrong to overproduce embryos - many of which will die? No one talks about the consequences of IVF. It seems acceptable to do IVF, even when throwing away embryos, because the net effect is that someone has a baby. Why can't someone have a baby and scientists get to do research on the ones that will get thrown away? Why is it so different to use embryos for research?
There is also a restriction on developing new lines of embryonic stem cells. While this sounds like a good compromise to a lot of people, consider that all of the existing stem cell lines were grown on mouse feeder cells. This means that all of the current lines of stem cells have some amount of mouse proteins in them. As such, they can't be used in human testing.
This is one of the biggest issues that gets left out of the discussions of Bush's stem cell research policies. I appreciate that research can be done, but right now that research can't really be used for anything.
If you RTFA, you'll notice that he is 18 now, not when he committed in 2003. He was 16 at the time, which makes him a minor. That makes him his parents' responsibility.
I can understand the opinion. Personally, I don't think that it would be particularly fun.
But, I don't deny that other people have a right to play the game. They absolutely do.
The problem here is that there are irresponsible parents out there who let their children play the games without knowing what is going on. I don't deny the right for parents to get information about the game and then choose to let their children play. But, I think the key is choice. Parents need to play an active role in deciding what's right for their kids. My parents did and I hated it at the time, but I absolutely understand why they did it now.
I have a very hard time with:
(a) Parents not being informed in their childrens' lives.
(b) The culture we live in that decides it's the videogame's fault and not the parents'.
Interestingly enough, there is discussion that it may not be possible to clone humans at this time. There have been "successful" clones of sheep, dogs, cats, and mice. I say "successful" because there is a very low percentage of living clones that come from current methods. However, as far as I know, no one has been able to clone a monkey or an ape even though many people have tried. We currently just don't seem to have the technology and the knowledge necessary to clone higher organisms.
On the one hand, this seems like a good idea. It holds the stores responsible for not enforcing the policies that they have in place - mainly fining them for selling (or renting) M-rated games to minors. Great, I guess.
On the other hand, I'm not really sure that this will fix the problem of uninformed parents buying and renting the games for their children. I don't have a problem with people deciding that it's ok that their child plays a game. I have a problem with parents not knowing what the game is and getting it for their kids because "my friend's mom said it's ok". That happens all the time. Are these parents going to be fined, too?
How do they avoid the common problem of fingerprint scanners: too stringent or too loose settings. If you set it too stringently, you get false negatives (rejecting people it should accept). In the other direction, you can get false positives.
I did an implementation at a hospital that used fingerprint scanners for the drugs in the unit. The nurses constantly complained that it wouldn't take their fingerprint when it should. This was partly due to settings and partly due to the scanner getting dirty and scratched.
I'd be interested to know how Thriftway is getting around those things.
If you go with the crickets, be sure to not buy them from your local pet store. Many of them buy wingless crickets so that when they are in your reptile cage they don't drive you crazy.
0 1KWFGG/qid=1107285581/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1_etk-kitche n/104-0380048-5259104?v=glance&s=kitchen&n=284507
Personally, I think this is a great plan. Occassionally, I'll get crickets with wings on them. They generally last a few days before my gecko eats them and it drives the people in my house absolutely crazy.
Variation on this plan..lady bugs. You can buy 9,000 of them from Amazon for $19.95 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
I think that there is a pretty negative stigma attached to being a gamer. It's very difficult to overcome. I don't think a games award show (be it Spike's horrible monstrosity or otherwise) is going to help the situation. There are a lot of gamers who are good people. The first big example that comes to mind is the guys over at Penny Arcade who set up the Child's Play Charity - http://childsplaycharity.org/ - in response to the negative image of gamers in the media. I'm sure there are others, but that was the first that came to mind.
I think the biggest problem is not that there are violent videogames. The games are rated for a reason. If you don't want your child to play GTA, Hitman, Halo, etc., don't buy them. I used to work at Target as a cashier. As a cashier, you're supposed to check IDs for games rated M (must be 17 or older). I'd ask people for them and they would have no clue that the game was rated or what the game was even about. The problem is that people like scapegoats for the way our society is. Violent videogames and movies are easy targets. They are easier to make go away and "fix" things than actual fixes are.
If she has a 17" powerbook, she doesn't need to get a USB mouse and carry around extra cords, etc. Since the powerbooks come with built-in bluetooth, she can get a bluetooth mouse. No cords, no dongles.
As far as carpal tunnel, I'm not sure she's any less likely to get it from a mouse than from the glidepoint/typing. I have it and I just mouse off-handed when it acts up. I've also got one of those mouse pads with wrist rests in them. They make a big difference when you spend 10 hours on a computer a day.
And Gladiator's success can be traced to Braveheart, which, IMO, spawned this whole series of epic movies. Notice how they all have a speech by the person commanding the army right before the big battle like in Braveheart? It's getting tired and that's why movies like Alexander and Troy are failing.
The same thing is going to happen to the video game industry. Honestly, I can't tell the difference between the WWII games out right now as they all look the same. Why buy a game that looks/feels almost identical to a game that you've already played? It seems silly to me.