Would curing a slow-growing cancer or rheumatoid arthritis morally wrong? How about giving someone a pair of glasses, or contacts or perhaps laser-eye surgery? How about restoring hearing to a deaf person (or simply the ability to hear about 20KHz again)? How about vaccinating against rubella or meningitis to prevent deafness? Or vaccinating people succeptible to polio or small pox? Well one could argue that many of these are approximatly the same level of intervention as curing color blindness.
The article generally assert that if DNA is some magic new science to be wary of because someone else's "fix" can be another person's "enhancement" as if this is some sort of new issue. Sadly it is not. HGH is a recent example of something not-dna related. HGH is medically useful to accelerate the development of children that have development deficiencies and are used by some atheletes to gain an enhancement. Some people are taking ritalin and adderall to help with hyperactivity, but others to get better SAT scores. An older example might be taking antibiotics or steroids.
DNA retro-technology isn't moral or immoral, it's just a new technology like many others that spun out of scientific research. The people who apply the technology are either moral or immoral (or amoral) about it. Sadly there are some of each type that apply any technological advance. I guess the question at least keeps bioethicist employed.
Fast rail is for passengers. Not freight. That can go by sea. Passengers need a direct route. Arcing north through Siberia and Alaska (past Sarah's place) is too slow, because even fast trains are slow compared to aircraft.
Not that this will actually happen anytime in the near future, but it isn't really too far off the direct route if you are only talking about being too far off the direct route being an issue. Of course trains are much slower than airplanes, but even planes arc past Sarah's place on such a journey.
In the recent past, it was easier to hug the coastline than to try to navigate the great circle route, but nowdays, airplanes have enough navigational safeguards to avoid tracing the coast. Of course in the past tracing the coast had other hazzards...
Perhaps there needs to be some law to require *LARGE* restaurants...
Although *LARGE* restaurants probably have more resources than small restaurants to do partake in a social engineering experiment, this always seems to be the standard "progressive" argument, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Oh wait, where did I hear that line before, it wasn't progressive, but....
If it's a good idea, shouldn't it be applied across the board? If that's not feasible, there should be a good reason or some equivalent that has the same principle. Maybe make the small restaurants stamp a disclaimer label on their menus:
WARNING: this menu does NOT contain the government mandated number of low-sodium dining options.
Well, isn't that fair? And if putting in a disclaimer is good enough for the small restaurant, why isn't that good enough for the large restaurants? You should ask yourself why some enterprising person hasn't been successful creating a chain of low-sodium (or regular-sodium) restaurants if there is a market for them for all the people that eat out alot like you do and are concerned about this.
As an alternate approach, perhaps why not just start with a pilot program with government run cafeterias (say capitol hill, public schools, prisons etc) to see what works and what doesn't work (yeah, I think I know why not, but it's a fair argument so humor me). I doubt many government owned or run cafeteria programs would be able to pull this off easily and they have the entire resources of the government behind them, but maybe it could be like the military/school "color-integration" program of past decade if done properly.
Historically, it's very populist to attempt social engineering on the *LARGE* guys by passing laws that attempt something and exempt the government agencies from the same requirements in the same breath. The *LARGE* guys lobby and either are successful at killing it or watering it down with FUD. However, if it turns out to be a really a good idea and there's an example that the government to point to, you know that the *LARGE* guys would be all over it in a heartbeat, so why not try that approach?
The standard answer it's easier for lawmakers to kibitz and pander than to actually properly define and solve a problem. If an smoking-ban bill and an trans-fat-ban bill made some politician popular, just think what an salt-bill bill will do to my career. Maybe we should just stick-it to restaurants instead of the whole population for now to get more populist support. All form, no substance.
Sadly, lately we (as a public) eat this all form, not substance approach up because we aren't taught or (at least don't exercise) critical thinking skills. It's like we've regressed as a society to a more primitive state of comfortable group-think led by cheerleaders tugging emotional heartstrings. Sigh...
At least this salt-ban bill isn't going anywhere in it's current form...
So, for all those folks getting upity about what is essentially a common business practice (reselling products to relablers on the spot market which possibly include reselling factory seconds), what do you think should be done with excess inventory, and/or functional, but not perfect products?
1. Bury them in a land-fill 2. Spend even more energy, money, and resources to recycle the raw materials and build yet another widget. 3. Sell them to relabelers to salvage the manufacturing value
Seems to me that #3 is the way to go to me. It recovers the most value from the resources that the manufacturing process consumed and thus probably is the best economical and environmental choice. Sure the products may or may not be of the best quality, but then again, you probably didn't pay a premium for them either.
In a non-utopian society, there are multiple value points that address the needs of consumers. Not every one needs "perfect" and not everyone can afford "perfect", but just because it's isn't perfect, it don't mean that a product can't meet someone's needs at that price point. Just the other day, I was shopping in an outlet store for a large department store where they resell returned and/or slighly damaged merchandise at over a 50% discount. As an example, they had a $6000 bedset for $895, but no returns were allowed. Okay, so maybe I can afford the $6000 bed, but maybe it's really only worth $895 to me. But for someone else, maybe they have $200 to spend and they get a bed that normally was priced at $800. As long as we know what we're buying, seems like this is a win-win for both parties.
It doesn't seem either economical or environmental to just scrap it if it isn't perfect to avoid offending anyone sensibilities? Basically this is not that different than craigslist at a corporate level. Instead of the initial customer deciding that it doesn't have economic value anymore to keep/use, the company is just deciding it doesn't have economic value to keep and/or sell through normal sales channels.
I guess these same folks just want us to cut down more trees and making more plastic parts dig up and burn more coal and fill more landfills. I suppose we could do that too, but some folks seem to be on both sides of the fence here and there's some congnitive disconnect going on with these lines of thinking. Maybe those folks just irrationally hate corporations and use any excuse to feed this cognitive disconnect between economic efficiency and environmental efficiency...
bugs don't become superbugs if they are a) dead, or b) never exposed to agents which cause them to become superbugs.
Although I agree with most of what you said, these agents don't actually cause a singular bug to somehow become a super bug. What they do is alter the environment enabling a favorable evolution of bugs into bugs that can survive in that new environment.
The problem is when we aren't clear about what we are saying (as people who are supposed to be "informed"), patients don't generally respond the correct way (e.g., they can stop taking vaccines, because they're just like antibiotics, and all that stuff causes bugs to mutate, right?).
Antibiotics, like all tools, have a purpose (e.g., can't use soap and hand sanitizers to clean out your lungs or other internal organs of a bacterial infections), and I agree they are overused, but sometimes the tradeoff is worth it.
Although part of the problem is the advertisement and promotion deluge (one-size-fits-all, buy my most profitable product, all your peers are doing it, why don't you), education of patients/consumers is a real problem. There are really no incentives for patients to get eduated in most healthcare systems and unforutnatly we all pay for it (this is not unlike people not having any incentives to get educated about the mortgage market).
When people are more educated, they tend to make better decisions, but sadly, there needs to be a motivation to get educated. Right now, either the health-care insurance company and/or the government is determining all the "options" and paying the bill. Because we can't trust patients to be educated, we defer to the medical establishment. From the medical estabishment's point of view dispensing anti-biotics is cheaper than talking to a doctor for a few moments (since the doctor is making $100+/hour) or have a doctor supervise the advancment of an unknown infection and avoid the anti-biotic even though it may be more expensive in the long run to society (it is of course cheaper for the patient to take the anti-biotics as well).
Not really sure how to change this, in a culture where people demand things right-now, whatever is best for me, damn the consequences to society, who cares about deferred gratification. Perhaps what we are really doing is taking a page from the bacteria and are evolving people that are resistant to so-called super-bugs. We've been able to avoid some forms of evolution by our use of technology, but perhaps there are limits to technology that we will hit and then we'll have to adapt...
Although capitalism might be to blame for this, I don't think the fault is with the companies, it's with the customers. They are getting what they want, it's just that the customers are short sighted and what they wan't isn't that great for society as a whole.
Maybe we can conclude that we should cap-and-trade antibiotics? or we should declare some non-resistant bacteria as endangered species?
The photo-electric effect is when electrons are released from a material when they absorb energy from photons. When the energy of the photons isn't above the threshold energy of the material, you get nothing. Also the energy of the emitted electrons doesn't depend on the intensity of the light.
This new technique called PINEM (photon-induced near-field electron microscopy), is used to image the "glow" (i.e., photon emissions) that is emitted by objects that have been excited by femto-second laser pulses using short pulses of electron beams. The image of the object glow is formed by measuring the energy of the scatterred short electron beam.
So in PINEM we are measuring a photons field using an electron pulse in a way where the electrons have a scatter function and different electron energies (think of this as an "analog" 4-d picture of the photon field), in the PE-effect, we are getting some number of electrons of a fixed energy which we can count (think of this like a "geiger counter" measurement of the incident photon field on the material).
Also since you are measuring a field and not the material, in the PE-effect, the material has to absorb the photon and emit (non-coherently) at it's electron work function energy. If the absorbtion ability and/or the energy disparity beween the photons and the work function is large, PE-effect doesn't even give you anything.
As a not very good analogy to think about, with PINEM, you can effectively take a "flash" picture (the flash is the femto-second laser pulse) of the photon emmission field which doesn't disturb the material that much. With any imaging technique that tried to use the PE effect, you'd have to illumiate the material with a photon field (over time and with different intensities) which wouldn't allow you to see anything. This would be like taking a picture with no shutter over a long period of time and imaging them with a binary threshold (kinda-like how old fax machines scanned pictures before dithering). Very blurry (because of the time averaging of the illumiation to get electrons emitted), and very uninteresting (because of the single energy level, uncorrelated nature of the electron emmission from the PE-effect). As another silly analogy, PE-effect is like hearing the alarm of water going above a dam, where PINEM is like looking at the a 3-d movie of the water-level behind the dam even if the water level didn't go above the dam.
Saying this is "old news" is like saying that the transistor was old news, because we discovered lightning a long time ago.;^)
Almost all netbooks on sale today with are intel-inside with cheeeep atom-chipsets with integrated graphics...
Nvidia ION-netbooks are just hitting the shelves now (not available until recently), and we'll see, but there aren't likely any historical failure rate number for any of the Nvidia ones yet.
If you saw this movie in the 1970's and saw a 2009-level computer photorealistic rendering of the trench sequence which is possible on a typical desktop computer today with a decent graphics card, you would probably say that the scene was obviously some model mockup because of the general idea of what a futuristic computer rendering was at the time and the fact that a photorealistic rendering is completely unexpected by the viewer.
The fact that they stretched the current technology at the time helps in the total illusion of high-tech. Anything higher-tech would have just gave the impression of "magic" and lead to a completely different feeling for the movie go-er and limited the suspension of disbelief.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future
The Tile64 is based on a proprietary VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture, on which a MIPS-like RISC architecture is implemented in microcode. A hypervisor enables each core to run its own instance of Linux, or alternatively the whole chip can run Tilera's 64-way SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing) Linux implementation.
Private and public performances are two entirely different things. If you're playing it for your workers, it's a private performance, unless customers happen to be able to hear it. If customers happen to hear the music, ZOMG, you just violated the copyright.
Although you are correct that private and public performance are different, you still have licensing problems for so-called private performance that are not part of a domestic or home-life environment (e.g., a "private" members only club, or say your workers) even if you don't have customers or not. You (and I) may think the laws are stupid, but this is what the precedence is (at least in the UK, Jennings v Stephens 1936). Public performance means it's a group of people and that group of people that hear the performance aren't in a domestic or home-life setting.
Sadly this is not funny. The CARB (California air resources board) are the same folks that were responsible for the MTBE fiasco in California which poluted all of our reservoirs in exchange for slightly cleaner air. I don't think it's totally unreasonable to ask what they haven't tested in this new required glass material...
Hopefully it won't outgas fumes that corrode copper wires or anything like that when baked daily under 100+ deg Farenheit parking lots (wait, that was only untested drywall), but you know what I mean;^)
Even it only blocked GPS and cell phones, I guess law enforcement has to give up their cell-phone ping tracking evidence gathering scheme. Civil righters rejoice?
Without any magnetic monopoles, this path integral that represents the magnetic circuit is merely analogous to a magnetic charge making a loop in the circuit creating a potential around the loop. Although this MMF is now taught as being generated by transformer/inductor coils wrapped around the magnetic circuit using the relationship MMF = N*i, but instead in a world with magnetic monopole current (i.e., magnetic current), in principle the same MMF relationships can be used.
Interestingly with magnetic monopoles this can also be extended like "electrical" circuit element.
R = dv/di, C = dq/dv, L = dF/di, M = dF/dq, i = dq/dt, and v = dF/dt
Historicall, only Resistance ~ Reluctance was the only one of the analogs that made sense w/o magnetic monopoles. Now that we have magnetic monopoles, the other electrical circuit elements now have possible analogs in a magnetic circuit.
So this is actually a similar idea that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
If it mutated to a more deadly variety- and there was _no_ natural immunity and _no_ artificial immunity (via the vaccination) then things would be bad.
....and the regular seasonal flu could mutate into a flying dragon too.
Or, perhaps the regular seasonal flu could mutate into a pandemic flu. Perhaps you aren't aware, but there is really nothing different between a "regular" flu and a "pandemic" flu other than the fact that it mutated into a particularly virulant strain. Just in case you need a clarification, virulent means rapidly spreading. The current novel H1N1 is observed to be virulant because it seems to have out-competed the normal crop of flus out there and also seems to have survived the normally dormant summer season.
On the other hand other, any flu (seasonal or pandemic) can mutate through antigenic drift/shift in a form that is is more or less virulent, cause illness of longer or shorter duration (because of the difficulty of the immune system of counteracting it either because of its novelty the health of the host, or the specific genetic makeup of the virus), or more or less compromising of the respritory system of the host (similar reasons as the duration).
Perhaps everyone is exercising an overabundance of caution (or paranoia), however, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't out to get you or that it's impossible or improbable;^)
Many people thought it was improbably that the current economic meltdown would happen. But it did. Some people organized their investment portfolios against this scenario buying euros and oil futures, some people just thought the market was going up forever and leveraged themselves in real-estate, some people took a position in the middle that hedged against some risk, but exposed them to some upside as well. I think that is an appropriate analogy. I'm not stockpiling food and gold and moving into Montana/Idaho to wait out the envitable collapse of civilation due to the H1N1 pandemic, however, I don't have my head in the sand either and being a pandemic-denier. I'll probably just get a shot because it's prudent and not overreacting and the risk seems low. Seems like a good idea to me.
Actually, they want people who are likely to be successful, and become leaders of tomorrow. These are the people that will go out and advertise their alma mater to the next generation. They are also the kind of people who end up making the big alumni donations.
As someone who has been involved with admissions (although not with MIT, but a similar school) I'll have to say that this is one of the unspoken critera. Basically private schools (like MIT) want successful alumni.
The first step is to admit people that are likely to matriculate. You'd be surprised how many applications come to selective colleges which look like "trophy-admits" or "back-up school application" (basically people who apply, but have no intention of ever going there). For a school like MIT, I'm sure they get students that also apply to Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Caltech. Say the student lives in Palo Alto and three generations of their family attended Stanford. I'm sure MIT looks pretty suspiciously at this type of application. This doesn't take a 500 word essay to figure out, maybe an interview with a local alum is all that is needed here.
The second step is to get people that aren't likely to flame out. Standardized testing and teacher recommendations are good for this.
Next is to get people that will likely value their university education in the future (enough to at least spread the good word and/or donate money). Teacher recommendations help a lot here to see if a student shows actual interest in something that university might offer. Maybe a interview might help here too.
Later on it's good to get people that will be successful enough to improve the reputation of the school. Schools with good reputations can attract better researchers and grant money which is the ultimate goal. This is basically a crap shoot. But sadly one predictor of success is whether one or both parents attended what level of college and if were at least mildly successful.
When doing admissions work, believe it or not, often people crunch numbers. If a school thought it could do well enough by picking people at random, I'm sure they might try it. Some things correlate, some things don't.
If you haven't applied to college lately (because you are an old fart like me), you might be amused to know that many colleges outsource their admission information collections process.
Although MIT isn't among the schools that use this (and just fyi, commonapp isn't just the rinky-dink colleges, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, and Princeton all use this). I guess that MIT thinks that they can cut down on the problem with the first step (too many "trophy-admit" applications), with this strategy. Who knows...
In any case, if you take a look at the common "supplements" in the commonapp site (selective colleges generally have supplements), you can see that almost everyone has the short-form essay or quick question answer format rather than a traditional long-form essay.
I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that MIT has similar issues with the essays and interviews that my alma-mater had when they reviewed the process. Professors and admissions staff that read the essays or give interviews had a great variance in evaluating these (some readers/interviewers are consistenly too hard, or too picky, or too biased) and averaging and accounting for these variances is really hard and time consuming. Making the admissions input process shorter and more structured allows more eyeballs on each application which usually leads to better outcomes for both sides (e.g., better matches).
If this "glass" scaffolding dissolves slowly, I'm guessing it would start out strong and get structurally weaker over time as it thins out. At some point before it is totally dissolved, it will probably be really brittle. Since it is glass-like, I'm guessing that it's possible that it could shatter even though the bone it's attached to has healed and is stronger (imagine a transverse shaking force applied to the bone like you might get when you trip and fall on the ground).
If the scaffolding does shatter and the pieces that shatter are sharp, it seems to me that bad things could happen (in constrast a titanium rod that doesn't dissolve over time wouldn't have a similar shattering risk).
I live in China. Generally speaking I eat Japanese, Vietnamese or Korean food. The flavours are much simpler, I find it much easier to eat..... No meat, mostly raw and barely any flavour, the three forbidden properties in Chinese cuisine.
Despite living in china, given your comment, I think you really don't know much about chinese food in general. Chinese food is very regional. For example in the southern part of china, the staple foods generally have no meat (since meat was/is historically expensive), and tends to be very lightly seasoned (because heavy seasoning would obscure the freshness of the food). It is however mostly cooked (because raw food in low-saninitary conditions is probably not very wise). There are variations of foods from any ethnic origin. Japanese curry is not at all like japanese sashimi, or Vietnamese Ph isn't very similar to Canh chua (sour soup), and Korean bi-bim-bap isn't very similar to naeng-guk. Of course everyone is entitiled to their own preferences, although perhaps you are just wanting to avoid eating "chinese" food for some subconscious reason, rather than a particular level of seasoning or taste.
The "tubes" are really iso-paths in 6-dimensional (3d position + 3d velocity). The "tubes" happen to connect the LaGrange points in 4d, though.
You do NOT have to navigate spacetime in your own power if you stay in these "tubes", although since they are 6-d isopaths, their "minimum energy" aspect to the path is really at their intrinsic velocity (which is why they are slow).
It's often hard to visualize this, but even though a gravity current path (the minimum energy path) in a 6-d manifold (position+velocity) has time-varying velocity 3d velocitu (because the path isn't straight in 3d space it implies some acceleration from a 3d perspective), the velocity change is still essentially zero energy because sometimes the energy for the required velocity changes can come from gravity interaction itself (imagine a "valley" of some sort in a 6-d manifold), although some may require being very near the optimal path (imagine a "ridge" of some sort in a 6-d manifold) and thus require small corrections to prevent "butterfly-effects" from pushing the spacecraft further away from the optimal path (which these small course corrections are still better than fighting gravity all the way to the destination).
A gravity assist trajectory is using the gravitational field of a large planet to divert a spacecraft to it's final destination. Since you are falling down a gravity well with this trajectory, you generate acceleration. The reason this works is that you are essentially "stealing" some of the momentum from the planet (think billiard balls colliding and exchanging momentum, but this is just without the collision).
This technique is almost the dual of the gravity assist in that it has the spacecraft follow the 3 dimensional paths of zero-net gravitational acceleration. Think of this like walking between two mountains mostly along the isolines (instead of taking a path where you are walking down into a valley and have to walk back up). The path might be long and windy to walk across the iso lines, but you reduce the total energy you have to expend (except to get from your starting point to the iso-line and from the iso-line to your destination). The reason these paths are called currents is that it really isn't a 2-d isopath with minimum energy you are following, but really a 6-d iso path (position and velocity thus a "current"). This is where the analogy breaks down with the 2d isopath.
So, to account for the mutations caused by their amplification procedure, they double checked the twelve candidate mutations they found against the donor's DNA from blood samples (not amplified by cell culture) and against the same regions in very close male relatives of the donors (if you are male and have a biological full brother, then your Y chromosomes should be almost completely identical). They scratched eight candidate mutations off as coming from the cell culture process, leaving four.
Not sure this is entirely correct. From the original posting article...
Having identified 23 candidate SNPs - or single letter changes in the DNA - they amplified the regions containing these candidates and checked the sequences using the standard Sanger method. A total of four naturally occurring mutations were confirmed. Knowing this number of mutations, the length of the area that they had searched and the number of generations separating the individuals, the team were able to calculate the rate of mutation.
It seems that instead of the procedure that you describe involving blood samples and whatnot, they instead took the two sequences and compared them to a reference Y chromosome. They identified 23 places where either of the two sequences were potentially different from the reference Y chromosome in established SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) locations. The doubled checked and found that 4 of the places the chromosome differed were in established SNPs of the Y chromosome (currently I believe there are 91,437 established naturally occuring SNPs in the Y chromosome out of 59,373,566 base pairs). So I think they are concluding that they observed a SNP mutation in 4 of the 12 cases where the DNA differs. The rest of the differences they seem to have attributed to the process used to sequence the DNA. I haven't had a chance to read the actual paper, though, to see how they might have accounted for unknown SNPs.
FWIW, it isn't required that you need infinitely many line segments to define something to make the parameterization ratio an irrational number...
For example, take a right triangle. If both legs are the same length (say "1"), the length of the hypotenuse is sqrt(2) which is an irrational number w/o a repetitive pattern in the numerical representation. However, if one of the legs is length "3" and the other is length "4", the hypotenuse is of course "5" which is not an irrational number. So we have a case of the length of one line segment giving us both rational and irrational numbers.
However, as it turns out, the converse is true that the straight line is the only curve that has a rational parameterization for arc-length, but that takes a bit more math to prove it...
I could have undercut these guys by about $14 mil, pulled a team together in about a week, gotten the job done quick and retired in style.
Of course you can't actually undercut them by $14M. You'd have to kickback that amount to lobbyists and donations to various favored Political action commitees, then you'd have to hire the second cousin of a large political donor and add them to your payroll. When you compare apples to oranges, of course you might think that you could undercut them, but when you add in all the "overhead" costs, it's really hard to do better than this...;^)
Certainly you (as an individual) might need to write paper cheque to perform certain financial needs, most folks don't need to deposit paper cheques in the normal course of business (except perhaps the occasional rebate check, large retail refunds, or birthday check from the rich uncle).
It might be entertaining to scan a check into your iphone for the bank, but I'm guessing that banks aren't really expecting very many check deposits this way. In the united states, the UETA (uniform electronic transactions act) passed in 1999 changed the rules so that banks don't need to keep paper copies of cancelled checks anymore to assure they would be legally binding. With the UETA, there's actually isn't really a need for the paper instruments.
For those insomniac tv-watchers out there, you may have noticed that you can buy things from infomercials over the phone w/o a credit card by just telling them your checking account number over the phone. These big companies don't need the paper. With the help of a bank and merchant agreement, you won't either (it's just currently uneconomical for an individual to have a merchant agreement).
This always begs the observation, clearing houses like PayPal are probably the future (Paypal is almost like a clearinghouse for payments not unlike a check clearing house).
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Would curing a slow-growing cancer or rheumatoid arthritis morally wrong?
How about giving someone a pair of glasses, or contacts or perhaps laser-eye surgery?
How about restoring hearing to a deaf person (or simply the ability to hear about 20KHz again)?
How about vaccinating against rubella or meningitis to prevent deafness?
Or vaccinating people succeptible to polio or small pox?
Well one could argue that many of these are approximatly the same level of intervention as curing color blindness.
The article generally assert that if DNA is some magic new science to be wary of because someone else's "fix" can be another person's "enhancement" as if this is some sort of new issue. Sadly it is not. HGH is a recent example of something not-dna related. HGH is medically useful to accelerate the development of children that have development deficiencies and are used by some atheletes to gain an enhancement. Some people are taking ritalin and adderall to help with hyperactivity, but others to get better SAT scores. An older example might be taking antibiotics or steroids.
DNA retro-technology isn't moral or immoral, it's just a new technology like many others that spun out of scientific research. The people who apply the technology are either moral or immoral (or amoral) about it. Sadly there are some of each type that apply any technological advance. I guess the question at least keeps bioethicist employed.
Have to hand it this guy, though.
Feynman succumbed to the peer pressure and accepted the prize. Perelman hasn't caved in to peer pressure yet and this is his second one...
Three words: great, circle, route...
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=PEK-SEA&MS=wls&PC=red&RC=navy&DU=mi
Not that this will actually happen anytime in the near future, but it isn't really too far off the direct route if you are only talking about being too far off the direct route being an issue. Of course trains are much slower than airplanes, but even planes arc past Sarah's place on such a journey.
In the recent past, it was easier to hug the coastline than to try to navigate the great circle route, but nowdays, airplanes have enough navigational safeguards to avoid tracing the coast. Of course in the past tracing the coast had other hazzards...
Although *LARGE* restaurants probably have more resources than small restaurants to do partake in a social engineering experiment, this always seems to be the standard "progressive" argument, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Oh wait, where did I hear that line before, it wasn't progressive, but....
If it's a good idea, shouldn't it be applied across the board? If that's not feasible, there should be a good reason or some equivalent that has the same principle. Maybe make the small restaurants stamp a disclaimer label on their menus:
WARNING: this menu does NOT contain the government mandated number of low-sodium dining options.
Well, isn't that fair? And if putting in a disclaimer is good enough for the small restaurant, why isn't that good enough for the large restaurants? You should ask yourself why some enterprising person hasn't been successful creating a chain of low-sodium (or regular-sodium) restaurants if there is a market for them for all the people that eat out alot like you do and are concerned about this.
As an alternate approach, perhaps why not just start with a pilot program with government run cafeterias (say capitol hill, public schools, prisons etc) to see what works and what doesn't work (yeah, I think I know why not, but it's a fair argument so humor me). I doubt many government owned or run cafeteria programs would be able to pull this off easily and they have the entire resources of the government behind them, but maybe it could be like the military/school "color-integration" program of past decade if done properly.
Historically, it's very populist to attempt social engineering on the *LARGE* guys by passing laws that attempt something and exempt the government agencies from the same requirements in the same breath. The *LARGE* guys lobby and either are successful at killing it or watering it down with FUD. However, if it turns out to be a really a good idea and there's an example that the government to point to, you know that the *LARGE* guys would be all over it in a heartbeat, so why not try that approach?
The standard answer it's easier for lawmakers to kibitz and pander than to actually properly define and solve a problem. If an smoking-ban bill and an trans-fat-ban bill made some politician popular, just think what an salt-bill bill will do to my career. Maybe we should just stick-it to restaurants instead of the whole population for now to get more populist support. All form, no substance.
Sadly, lately we (as a public) eat this all form, not substance approach up because we aren't taught or (at least don't exercise) critical thinking skills. It's like we've regressed as a society to a more primitive state of comfortable group-think led by cheerleaders tugging emotional heartstrings. Sigh...
At least this salt-ban bill isn't going anywhere in it's current form...
So, for all those folks getting upity about what is essentially a common business practice (reselling products to relablers on the spot market which possibly include reselling factory seconds), what do you think should be done with excess inventory, and/or functional, but not perfect products?
1. Bury them in a land-fill
2. Spend even more energy, money, and resources to recycle the raw materials and build yet another widget.
3. Sell them to relabelers to salvage the manufacturing value
Seems to me that #3 is the way to go to me. It recovers the most value from the resources that the manufacturing process consumed and thus probably is the best economical and environmental choice. Sure the products may or may not be of the best quality, but then again, you probably didn't pay a premium for them either.
In a non-utopian society, there are multiple value points that address the needs of consumers. Not every one needs "perfect" and not everyone can afford "perfect", but just because it's isn't perfect, it don't mean that a product can't meet someone's needs at that price point. Just the other day, I was shopping in an outlet store for a large department store where they resell returned and/or slighly damaged merchandise at over a 50% discount. As an example, they had a $6000 bedset for $895, but no returns were allowed. Okay, so maybe I can afford the $6000 bed, but maybe it's really only worth $895 to me. But for someone else, maybe they have $200 to spend and they get a bed that normally was priced at $800. As long as we know what we're buying, seems like this is a win-win for both parties.
It doesn't seem either economical or environmental to just scrap it if it isn't perfect to avoid offending anyone sensibilities? Basically this is not that different than craigslist at a corporate level. Instead of the initial customer deciding that it doesn't have economic value anymore to keep/use, the company is just deciding it doesn't have economic value to keep and/or sell through normal sales channels.
I guess these same folks just want us to cut down more trees and making more plastic parts dig up and burn more coal and fill more landfills. I suppose we could do that too, but some folks seem to be on both sides of the fence here and there's some congnitive disconnect going on with these lines of thinking. Maybe those folks just irrationally hate corporations and use any excuse to feed this cognitive disconnect between economic efficiency and environmental efficiency...
Although I agree with most of what you said, these agents don't actually cause a singular bug to somehow become a super bug. What they do is alter the environment enabling a favorable evolution of bugs into bugs that can survive in that new environment.
The problem is when we aren't clear about what we are saying (as people who are supposed to be "informed"), patients don't generally respond the correct way (e.g., they can stop taking vaccines, because they're just like antibiotics, and all that stuff causes bugs to mutate, right?).
Antibiotics, like all tools, have a purpose (e.g., can't use soap and hand sanitizers to clean out your lungs or other internal organs of a bacterial infections), and I agree they are overused, but sometimes the tradeoff is worth it.
Although part of the problem is the advertisement and promotion deluge (one-size-fits-all, buy my most profitable product, all your peers are doing it, why don't you), education of patients/consumers is a real problem. There are really no incentives for patients to get eduated in most healthcare systems and unforutnatly we all pay for it (this is not unlike people not having any incentives to get educated about the mortgage market).
When people are more educated, they tend to make better decisions, but sadly, there needs to be a motivation to get educated. Right now, either the health-care insurance company and/or the government is determining all the "options" and paying the bill.
Because we can't trust patients to be educated, we defer to the medical establishment. From the medical estabishment's point of view dispensing anti-biotics is cheaper than talking to a doctor for a few moments (since the doctor is making $100+/hour) or have a doctor supervise the advancment of an unknown infection and avoid the anti-biotic even though it may be more expensive in the long run to society (it is of course cheaper for the patient to take the anti-biotics as well).
Not really sure how to change this, in a culture where people demand things right-now, whatever is best for me, damn the consequences to society, who cares about deferred gratification. Perhaps what we are really doing is taking a page from the bacteria and are evolving people that are resistant to so-called super-bugs. We've been able to avoid some forms of evolution by our use of technology, but perhaps there are limits to technology that we will hit and then we'll have to adapt...
Although capitalism might be to blame for this, I don't think the fault is with the companies, it's with the customers. They are getting what they want, it's just that the customers are short sighted and what they wan't isn't that great for society as a whole.
Maybe we can conclude that we should cap-and-trade antibiotics? or we should declare some non-resistant bacteria as endangered species?
The photo-electric effect is when electrons are released from a material when they absorb energy from photons. When the energy of the photons isn't above the threshold energy of the material, you get nothing. Also the energy of the emitted electrons doesn't depend on the intensity of the light.
This new technique called PINEM (photon-induced near-field electron microscopy), is used to image the "glow" (i.e., photon emissions) that is emitted by objects that have been excited by femto-second laser pulses using short pulses of electron beams. The image of the object glow is formed by measuring the energy of the scatterred short electron beam.
So in PINEM we are measuring a photons field using an electron pulse in a way where the electrons have a scatter function and different electron energies (think of this as an "analog" 4-d picture of the photon field), in the PE-effect, we are getting some number of electrons of a fixed energy which we can count (think of this like a "geiger counter" measurement of the incident photon field on the material).
Also since you are measuring a field and not the material, in the PE-effect, the material has to absorb the photon and emit (non-coherently) at it's electron work function energy. If the absorbtion ability and/or the energy disparity beween the photons and the work function is large, PE-effect doesn't even give you anything.
As a not very good analogy to think about, with PINEM, you can effectively take a "flash" picture (the flash is the femto-second laser pulse) of the photon emmission field which doesn't disturb the material that much. With any imaging technique that tried to use the PE effect, you'd have to illumiate the material with a photon field (over time and with different intensities) which wouldn't allow you to see anything. This would be like taking a picture with no shutter over a long period of time and imaging them with a binary threshold (kinda-like how old fax machines scanned pictures before dithering). Very blurry (because of the time averaging of the illumiation to get electrons emitted), and very uninteresting (because of the single energy level, uncorrelated nature of the electron emmission from the PE-effect). As another silly analogy, PE-effect is like hearing the alarm of water going above a dam, where PINEM is like looking at the a 3-d movie of the water-level behind the dam even if the water level didn't go above the dam.
Saying this is "old news" is like saying that the transistor was old news, because we discovered lightning a long time ago. ;^)
If it's really 3.75 times faster maybe they could call it the FASTRA System 360 Model 96 (or the Fastra 360/96) for short ;^)
Almost all netbooks on sale today with are intel-inside with cheeeep atom-chipsets with integrated graphics...
Nvidia ION-netbooks are just hitting the shelves now (not available until recently), and we'll see, but there aren't likely any historical failure rate number for any of the Nvidia ones yet.
The ironic part about this is less is often more.
If you saw this movie in the 1970's and saw a 2009-level computer photorealistic rendering of the trench sequence which is possible on a typical desktop computer today with a decent graphics card, you would probably say that the scene was obviously some model mockup because of the general idea of what a futuristic computer rendering was at the time and the fact that a photorealistic rendering is completely unexpected by the viewer.
The fact that they stretched the current technology at the time helps in the total illusion of high-tech. Anything higher-tech would have just gave the impression of "magic" and lead to a completely different feeling for the movie go-er and limited the suspension of disbelief.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future
The company website claims...
64-bit VLIW processors with 64-bit instruction bundle
3-deep pipeline with up to 3 instructions per cycle
I don't know how this could be considered ARM or MIPS-derived...
A better description might have been in this article...
Although you are correct that private and public performance are different, you still have licensing problems for so-called private performance that are not part of a domestic or home-life environment (e.g., a "private" members only club, or say your workers) even if you don't have customers or not. You (and I) may think the laws are stupid, but this is what the precedence is (at least in the UK, Jennings v Stephens 1936). Public performance means it's a group of people and that group of people that hear the performance aren't in a domestic or home-life setting.
Sadly this is not funny. The CARB (California air resources board) are the same folks that were responsible for the MTBE fiasco in California which poluted all of our reservoirs in exchange for slightly cleaner air. I don't think it's totally unreasonable to ask what they haven't tested in this new required glass material...
Hopefully it won't outgas fumes that corrode copper wires or anything like that when baked daily under 100+ deg Farenheit parking lots (wait, that was only untested drywall), but you know what I mean ;^)
Even it only blocked GPS and cell phones, I guess law enforcement has to give up their cell-phone ping tracking evidence gathering scheme. Civil righters rejoice?
Well, in the interest of closing the loop, these aren't totally disjoint ideas ;^)
In the standard magnetic circuit with flux and field, the analogy between a magnetic circuit and an electrial circuit is
MMF = PATHINTEGRAL (H dot dl) vs EMF = PATHINTEGRAL(E dot dl)
Without any magnetic monopoles, this path integral that represents the magnetic circuit is merely analogous to a magnetic charge making a loop in the circuit creating a potential around the loop. Although this MMF is now taught as being generated by transformer/inductor coils wrapped around the magnetic circuit using the relationship MMF = N*i, but instead in a world with magnetic monopole current (i.e., magnetic current), in principle the same MMF relationships can be used.
Interestingly with magnetic monopoles this can also be extended like "electrical" circuit element.
R = dv/di, C = dq/dv, L = dF/di, M = dF/dq, i = dq/dt, and v = dF/dt
Historicall, only Resistance ~ Reluctance was the only one of the analogs that made sense w/o magnetic monopoles.
Now that we have magnetic monopoles, the other electrical circuit elements now have possible analogs in a magnetic circuit.
So this is actually a similar idea that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
Or, perhaps the regular seasonal flu could mutate into a pandemic flu. Perhaps you aren't aware, but there is really nothing different between a "regular" flu and a "pandemic" flu other than the fact that it mutated into a particularly virulant strain. Just in case you need a clarification, virulent means rapidly spreading. The current novel H1N1 is observed to be virulant because it seems to have out-competed the normal crop of flus out there and also seems to have survived the normally dormant summer season.
On the other hand other, any flu (seasonal or pandemic) can mutate through antigenic drift/shift in a form that is is more or less virulent, cause illness of longer or shorter duration (because of the difficulty of the immune system of counteracting it either because of its novelty the health of the host, or the specific genetic makeup of the virus), or more or less compromising of the respritory system of the host (similar reasons as the duration).
Perhaps everyone is exercising an overabundance of caution (or paranoia), however, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't out to get you or that it's impossible or improbable ;^)
Many people thought it was improbably that the current economic meltdown would happen. But it did. Some people organized their investment portfolios against this scenario buying euros and oil futures, some people just thought the market was going up forever and leveraged themselves in real-estate, some people took a position in the middle that hedged against some risk, but exposed them to some upside as well. I think that is an appropriate analogy. I'm not stockpiling food and gold and moving into Montana/Idaho to wait out the envitable collapse of civilation due to the H1N1 pandemic, however, I don't have my head in the sand either and being a pandemic-denier. I'll probably just get a shot because it's prudent and not overreacting and the risk seems low. Seems like a good idea to me.
As someone who has been involved with admissions (although not with MIT, but a similar school) I'll have to say that this is one of the unspoken critera. Basically private schools (like MIT) want successful alumni.
The first step is to admit people that are likely to matriculate. You'd be surprised how many applications come to selective colleges which look like "trophy-admits" or "back-up school application" (basically people who apply, but have no intention of ever going there). For a school like MIT, I'm sure they get students that also apply to Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Caltech. Say the student lives in Palo Alto and three generations of their family attended Stanford. I'm sure MIT looks pretty suspiciously at this type of application. This doesn't take a 500 word essay to figure out, maybe an interview with a local alum is all that is needed here.
The second step is to get people that aren't likely to flame out. Standardized testing and teacher recommendations are good for this.
Next is to get people that will likely value their university education in the future (enough to at least spread the good word and/or donate money). Teacher recommendations help a lot here to see if a student shows actual interest in something that university might offer. Maybe a interview might help here too.
Later on it's good to get people that will be successful enough to improve the reputation of the school. Schools with good reputations can attract better researchers and grant money which is the ultimate goal. This is basically a crap shoot. But sadly one predictor of success is whether one or both parents attended what level of college and if were at least mildly successful.
When doing admissions work, believe it or not, often people crunch numbers. If a school thought it could do well enough by picking people at random, I'm sure they might try it. Some things correlate, some things don't.
If you haven't applied to college lately (because you are an old fart like me), you might be amused to know that many colleges outsource their admission information collections process.
https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/default.aspx
Although MIT isn't among the schools that use this (and just fyi, commonapp isn't just the rinky-dink colleges, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, and Princeton all use this). I guess that MIT thinks that they can cut down on the problem with the first step (too many "trophy-admit" applications), with this strategy. Who knows...
In any case, if you take a look at the common "supplements" in the commonapp site (selective colleges generally have supplements), you can see that almost everyone has the short-form essay or quick question answer format rather than a traditional long-form essay.
I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that MIT has similar issues with the essays and interviews that my alma-mater had when they reviewed the process. Professors and admissions staff that read the essays or give interviews had a great variance in evaluating these (some readers/interviewers are consistenly too hard, or too picky, or too biased) and averaging and accounting for these variances is really hard and time consuming. Making the admissions input process shorter and more structured allows more eyeballs on each application which usually leads to better outcomes for both sides (e.g., better matches).
If this "glass" scaffolding dissolves slowly, I'm guessing it would start out strong and get structurally weaker over time as it thins out. At some point before it is totally dissolved, it will probably be really brittle. Since it is glass-like, I'm guessing that it's possible that it could shatter even though the bone it's attached to has healed and is stronger (imagine a transverse shaking force applied to the bone like you might get when you trip and fall on the ground).
If the scaffolding does shatter and the pieces that shatter are sharp, it seems to me that bad things could happen (in constrast a titanium rod that doesn't dissolve over time wouldn't have a similar shattering risk).
Despite living in china, given your comment, I think you really don't know much about chinese food in general.
Chinese food is very regional. For example in the southern part of china, the staple foods generally have no meat (since meat was/is historically expensive), and tends to be very lightly seasoned (because heavy seasoning would obscure the freshness of the food). It is however mostly cooked (because raw food in low-saninitary conditions is probably not very wise). There are variations of foods from any ethnic origin. Japanese curry is not at all like japanese sashimi, or Vietnamese Ph isn't very similar to Canh chua (sour soup), and Korean bi-bim-bap isn't very similar to naeng-guk. Of course everyone is entitiled to their own preferences, although perhaps you are just wanting to avoid eating "chinese" food for some subconscious reason, rather than a particular level of seasoning or taste.
The "tubes" are really iso-paths in 6-dimensional (3d position + 3d velocity).
The "tubes" happen to connect the LaGrange points in 4d, though.
You do NOT have to navigate spacetime in your own power if you stay in these "tubes", although since they are 6-d isopaths, their "minimum energy" aspect to the path is really at their intrinsic velocity (which is why they are slow).
Let's try to get this one right...
Just thought I'd add another clarifying point.
It's often hard to visualize this, but even though a gravity current path (the minimum energy path) in a 6-d manifold (position+velocity) has time-varying velocity 3d velocitu (because the path isn't straight in 3d space it implies some acceleration from a 3d perspective), the velocity change is still essentially zero energy because sometimes the energy for the required velocity changes can come from gravity interaction itself (imagine a "valley" of some sort in a 6-d manifold), although some may require being very near the optimal path (imagine a "ridge" of some sort in a 6-d manifold) and thus require small corrections to prevent "butterfly-effects" from pushing the spacecraft further away from the optimal path (which these small course corrections are still better than fighting gravity all the way to the destination).
A gravity assist trajectory is using the gravitational field of a large planet to divert a spacecraft to it's final destination. Since you are falling down a gravity well with this trajectory, you generate acceleration. The reason this works is that you are essentially "stealing" some of the momentum from the planet (think billiard balls colliding and exchanging momentum, but this is just without the collision).
This technique is almost the dual of the gravity assist in that it has the spacecraft follow the 3 dimensional paths of zero-net gravitational acceleration. Think of this like walking between two mountains mostly along the isolines (instead of taking a path where you are walking down into a valley and have to walk back up). The path might be long and windy to walk across the iso lines, but you reduce the total energy you have to expend (except to get from your starting point to the iso-line and from the iso-line to your destination). The reason these paths are called currents is that it really isn't a 2-d isopath with minimum energy you are following, but really a 6-d iso path (position and velocity thus a "current"). This is where the analogy breaks down with the 2d isopath.
BTW, this is really, really old news... http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2002/release_2002_147.html
And also a DUPE http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/07/215211&mode=thread&tid=160
Not sure this is entirely correct. From the original posting article...
It seems that instead of the procedure that you describe involving blood samples and whatnot, they instead took the two sequences and compared them to a reference Y chromosome. They identified 23 places where either of the two sequences were potentially different from the reference Y chromosome in established SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) locations. The doubled checked and found that 4 of the places the chromosome differed were in established SNPs of the Y chromosome (currently I believe there are 91,437 established naturally occuring SNPs in the Y chromosome out of 59,373,566 base pairs). So I think they are concluding that they observed a SNP mutation in 4 of the 12 cases where the DNA differs. The rest of the differences they seem to have attributed to the process used to sequence the DNA. I haven't had a chance to read the actual paper, though, to see how they might have accounted for unknown SNPs.
FWIW, it isn't required that you need infinitely many line segments to define something to make the parameterization ratio an irrational number...
For example, take a right triangle. If both legs are the same length (say "1"), the length of the hypotenuse is sqrt(2) which is an irrational number w/o a repetitive pattern in the numerical representation. However, if one of the legs is length "3" and the other is length "4", the hypotenuse is of course "5" which is not an irrational number. So we have a case of the length of one line segment giving us both rational and irrational numbers.
However, as it turns out, the converse is true that the straight line is the only curve that has a rational parameterization for arc-length, but that takes a bit more math to prove it...
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1523523.1523896
Of course you can't actually undercut them by $14M. You'd have to kickback that amount to lobbyists and donations to various favored Political action commitees, then you'd have to hire the second cousin of a large political donor and add them to your payroll. When you compare apples to oranges, of course you might think that you could undercut them, but when you add in all the "overhead" costs, it's really hard to do better than this... ;^)
Certainly you (as an individual) might need to write paper cheque to perform certain financial needs, most folks don't need to deposit paper cheques in the normal course of business (except perhaps the occasional rebate check, large retail refunds, or birthday check from the rich uncle).
It might be entertaining to scan a check into your iphone for the bank, but I'm guessing that banks aren't really expecting very many check deposits this way. In the united states, the UETA (uniform electronic transactions act) passed in 1999 changed the rules so that banks don't need to keep paper copies of cancelled checks anymore to assure they would be legally binding. With the UETA, there's actually isn't really a need for the paper instruments.
For those insomniac tv-watchers out there, you may have noticed that you can buy things from infomercials over the phone w/o a credit card by just telling them your checking account number over the phone. These big companies don't need the paper. With the help of a bank and merchant agreement, you won't either (it's just currently uneconomical for an individual to have a merchant agreement).
This always begs the observation, clearing houses like PayPal are probably the future (Paypal is almost like a clearinghouse for payments not unlike a check clearing house).