2. Adult stem cells are multipotent progenitor cells
IANAB, but that is not consistant with how I've heard the term used. From what I understand, and wikipedia agrees is that the difference between progenitor and stem cells is whether they can divide indefinitely. The pecking order of how differentiated a cell is is like so:
Embryonic Stem Cells (pluripotent) Adult/Somatic Stem Cells (multipotent) Progenitor Cells (can be multipotent or unipotent) Fully Differentiated Cells.
I've seen some variation in whether people call both adult stem cells and multipotent progenitor cells "partially differentiated" or draw a bright line between the two and call them undifferentiated and differentiated respectively. But regardless multipotent progenitor cells are considered "more differentiated" than adult stem cells.
Hmm, is there any difference between pressed media in a just opened shrink-wrapped jewel case, compared to burned media in the same packaging.
I would expect media in a newly open spindle to have a stronger smell than long opened media just because of the way it was packed, and the fact that it hasn't had as much time / surface area for the plastic to out-gas.
Which is to be expected. Controlling the differentiation of a cell is still not completely understood and difficult to do. It is easier with partially differentiated cells, and hence with stem cells from the tissue that we wish to regrow. Therefore, the first practical treatments and applications of stem cell research will be using adult stem cells.
Where embryonic stem cells come into play is by helping understand this differentiation process better. Increasing our knowledge will enable us to develop treatments that aren't possible using adult stem cells, but it will also likely contribute to having safer more effective adult stem cell treatments treatments. It may even shed some light into the entire aging process and cell life-cycle. They are very important things to be studying.
To put it succinctly, adult stem cells are currently at the R&D stage, embryonic at the pure science stage. Both are important.
I helped out with a small ISP in the 90's whose sole purpose was to pay the costs of having a T1 running to the owner's house:) There were less than two dozen actual accounts. We got tons of dictionary attack spam. Perhaps spammers have stopped targeting smaller domains as the number of them have grown, but it was enough to convince me not to setup a catch-all account when I created my own domain. I think sub-addressing is a better compromise, as it is really no more work than using a catch-all account, but is far less likely to be subject to brute-force spam.
We tried to do it the IT way at first, but you should have seen the fit the HOA threw after the first stage ignition test. I don't see what the problem was, the neighbors have barbecues over at their place all the time. And don't get me started on all the whining over a little bit of harmless pressurized hydrazine in the garage. I mean we only leaked a few liters of the stuff.
It goes further than that. I like to think I'm pretty decent at explaining concepts to people who are interested in hearing them, at least if I have some time prepare, rather than going off the cuff.
But public debates have nothing to do with honestly communicating or explaining and everything to do with persuading people honestly or not. I just don't know how to compete with people who say what everyone wants to hear even though it is wrong, people that can stand up and sound legitimate even though every word that comes out of their mouth is fabricated crap.
You can explain that they are wrong, and how we know they are wrong. But in the end all the general public sees are two "experts" who disagree. They don't know who to believe and more often than not lean towards the person that confirms their existing preconceptions. This muddying of the water has implications greater than just my failure to convince people on a single issue. It creates the impression that scientists don't know what they are doing, that our understanding of things isn't improving with time, that a wild-ass guess is as valid as a well tested and supported scientific theory.
Or to put it in more comparable units, it will only take a fraction of a second for this bulb to save the amount energy used by the laser when compared to a standard bulb:
From the point of view of a student I strongly agree with StandardCell. In my CS program I learned both VHDL (in our Digital Electronics class) and Verilog (in CPU Architecture). The familiarity of Verilog created more problems than it solved (especially for folks who didn't learn VHDL in their digital class), because people tried to think about it like it was C, and use it like C, it isn't C. Frankly, learning a new syntax is a piece of cake, compared to getting students with a background in programming to wrap their head around the concept of designing circuits. VHDL is structured in a way that forces you to think about the design from a hardware point of view. Verilog may be good for larger projects, that need the higher level of abstraction that it provides, but that abstraction is a stumbling block for beginners.
Not really. The advantages that religious organizations get in the US are pretty much the same that any non-profit organization can receive. For historical reasons, different types of organizations have to fill out different types of paperwork to apply for exempt status, but the same is true of our entire jumbled mess of a tax code. There is crap like the "Faith Based Initiatives", that really needs to go away but the core of tax-exempt status is pretty much the same as secular organizations.
and it saves me about $100/mo. on the power bill (I live in SoCal so power costs me.31/kwh)
Holy fuck. You are saving 320 kwh per month? I don't even want to know how much you are using. My total electric bill is usually less than that, and I don't think it has ever been over 500 kwh, even when I wasn't trying to save energy in the dead of summer in the middle of the desert.
Even if flash opened up completely, all the codecs it uses for video are still proprietary, and Adobe has no leverage to change that even if they wanted to. So at best opening up Flash removes the need for SVG and the new HTML 5 webapp features. It doesn't change the need for an open video codec at all.
Every laptop I have owned has taken just as long, if not longer, to come out of hibernation than to boot (suspend is a little faster). And for some reason it takes longer for networking to start working after coming out of hibernation compared to booting from scratch. And about a quarter of the time I come out of hibernation Client Side Caching ("Make files available offline") gets into this funky state causing any file access (offline or not) to take forever, requiring me to reboot anyway.
I use hibernation because I'm lazy and want to keep my applications open, but if I didn't, it would be just a quick and much less troublesome to just shutdown and reboot. Comparing the hibernate time of a computer to the "instant-on" time of most consumer electronic isn't even close.
First, this is a business question you are asking in a techie forum, bad idea. You are running a business, possibly selling a business, go get yourself some business advisers
I disagree. Sure, he should absolutely talk to a lawyer and business adviser to help decide if this particular deal is a good one, what pitfalls need to be avoided, and how to negotiate the best deal.
But that isn't what was on his mind. He was asking which of these paths had more potential to make him happy and be more fulfilling for a techie. Other techies which have been in similar circumstances can answer that question far better than any business adviser could.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to provide us with rocks. Rocks which we can store in nitrogen purged safes, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Seriously. We have to go through the normal upgrade cycle each time MS Office is released, and I have not seen a single improvement to Office in the last 3 releases. And it's not just because Office is mature and has nothing left to fix. I have a list of things I would love to see done, the top of the list being to kill fucking MDI. For the sake of those oddballs like me that would like to do something completely unreasonable like display two spreadsheets on different screens. Or to display a tall-skinny spreadsheet and a short-wide spreadsheet, and have room to show different application in the left over space. I know, this is crazy talk. No one has monitors larger than 15 inches, and using applications in any mode but fullscreen is heresy. Next thing you know I'm going to be asking for the ability to overlap applications using a concept called "windowing".
So, if Gannett and McClatchy and some of the other big boys follow suit, you don't think that's going to cause massive problems for free aggregator* sites?
I think the effect on aggregator sites is going to be the same either way.
If News corp doesn't show a massive drop in profits (and they won't, since the online revenue is shit) then others will follow their lead.
And they'll still go out of business because their print revenues are dropping too. In order to survive they need to increase their online revenues - "our revenue only decreased slightly" isn't going to cut it.
In the end it's just accelerating the inevitable. Before each newspaper operated in a small little regional market. With the rise of the internet they are largely all competing in the same market, as a result the market is now oversaturated and there will be a massive pruning/consolidation. This is going to require changes in the pricing agreement between news feeds and newspapers (if the concept of separate newsfeeds and newspapers survives at all). But this is the only thing that is going to increase revenue - increasing the number of customers per site.
I think concern about aggregators destroying all "real journalism" is overstated. It has value and as such will stick around. Furthermore, I don't think blogs and other aggregators are hurting new sites. Even when they quote large portions of the story (which I don't approve of), they still link to it, and many readers follow and read that link. More, I believe, than would have had the blog not been written at all. Furthermore, readers often post links to alternate write-ups of the same subject increasing traffic further.
If ad-funded news dies, it won't be because of aggregators - in fact aggregator linking will continue to provide a strong incentive to stay ad-funded, if possible. If they die it will be because it is not possible to fund actual news gathering with advertisements. I personally don't think this will happen, but admittedly can't provide a good argument for that opinion.
--
My only real concern is the effects on local news. I don't know the actual break down of costs for these papers, or what content drives what percentage of purchases, but I think that local news gathering has long been subsidized by newsfeed driven sales. This is going away.
As a younger person, I would love to have a weekly paper intended to be a primary local new source. I don't care about all the national/world news, since I can find better sources elsewhere. Not enough happens to warrant a daily publication, nor do I have time to read a daily publication, and stuff that does have to be up-to-the-minute (stocks, weather, sports scores) is better suited to be online anyway. By writing weekly, coverage of a topic could be more full (rather than a quick update of what has happened since the last article) and could avoid that horrible in-side-out writing style that newspapers use now. The cost for journalists would stay the same (or preferably increase), but the costs for editing and printing would greatly decrease, and the cost for national feeds would disappear. Of course, since it was only weekly most people would not be willing to pay as much (I would, but I value quality news over quantity*). I don't know if this model would work out or not.
They are in a particularly bad place right now because a large percentage of their old customers aren't like me and still want all that national news along with stocks, weather, and sports scores delivered daily, so they can't shed those costs without risking alienating them. I'm very worried that TV "news" is going to be the only source of local content.
If so people will pay for it. If you are just regurgitating AP and/or Reuters people will not. The Wall Street Journal and The Economist provide something unique, and have been successful with subscriptions (the fact that they cater to moneyed-folk helps too). To a lesser extent the New York Post and Christian Science Monitor provide unique information and may have luck transitioning to a subscription model.
As for the rest of the newpapers that News Corporation owns, yeah I don't think so. Some of the ones that I'm not familiar with may have sufficient unique content, but most of them don't look like it. Good luck making The Sun subscription only. The online portion of that magazine thrives on ignorant (or amused) blog linking, and would loose nearly all of it's traffic if it went subscription only.
The biggest thing that stands out to me is the fact that they made the keyboard smaller than the one on the Kindle 2 (less than half the height), when the device is much bigger. Which raises the question of why the keyboard needs to take up so much space on the Kindle 2 to begin with. Did they need the space for batteries / circuit boards, and just made the keyboard big since they had the room?
Anyway this looks interesting. I can't see myself buying an eBook reader just for paperbacks, but technical content is a whole different ball game. Just the ability to search is a big improvement over books. This is finally getting to that point. It is still more expensive than I'd pay and the refresh could be improved, but it is much closer than we were 5 years ago.
For those that were wondering how they got 160 characters into 128 bytes (6.4 bits/char), they didn't. The increased the length of the frame to 140 bytes, which is is 160 characters using a 7 bits/char. Curiosity forced me to look this up, expecting to find some snazzy compacting algorithm for a non power-of-two alphabet.
Slashdot Mirror
2. Adult stem cells are multipotent progenitor cells
IANAB, but that is not consistant with how I've heard the term used.
From what I understand, and wikipedia agrees is that the difference between progenitor and stem cells is whether they can divide indefinitely. The pecking order of how differentiated a cell is is like so:
Embryonic Stem Cells (pluripotent)
Adult/Somatic Stem Cells (multipotent)
Progenitor Cells (can be multipotent or unipotent)
Fully Differentiated Cells.
I've seen some variation in whether people call both adult stem cells and multipotent progenitor cells "partially differentiated" or draw a bright line between the two and call them undifferentiated and differentiated respectively. But regardless multipotent progenitor cells are considered "more differentiated" than adult stem cells.
Hmm, is there any difference between pressed media in a just opened shrink-wrapped jewel case, compared to burned media in the same packaging.
I would expect media in a newly open spindle to have a stronger smell than long opened media just because of the way it was packed, and the fact that it hasn't had as much time / surface area for the plastic to out-gas.
Which is to be expected. Controlling the differentiation of a cell is still not completely understood and difficult to do. It is easier with partially differentiated cells, and hence with stem cells from the tissue that we wish to regrow. Therefore, the first practical treatments and applications of stem cell research will be using adult stem cells.
Where embryonic stem cells come into play is by helping understand this differentiation process better. Increasing our knowledge will enable us to develop treatments that aren't possible using adult stem cells, but it will also likely contribute to having safer more effective adult stem cell treatments treatments. It may even shed some light into the entire aging process and cell life-cycle. They are very important things to be studying.
To put it succinctly, adult stem cells are currently at the R&D stage, embryonic at the pure science stage. Both are important.
Yes, who would have know that among the java data types, short is an Aries and double is a Capricorn:) Explains a lot really.
Seriously though, it does a good job on populating the Name and Description columns. After that, not so much.
I helped out with a small ISP in the 90's whose sole purpose was to pay the costs of having a T1 running to the owner's house :) There were less than two dozen actual accounts. We got tons of dictionary attack spam. Perhaps spammers have stopped targeting smaller domains as the number of them have grown, but it was enough to convince me not to setup a catch-all account when I created my own domain. I think sub-addressing is a better compromise, as it is really no more work than using a catch-all account, but is far less likely to be subject to brute-force spam.
Ah yes, my tongue can attest to that.
Note to self: do not hold bare telephone wires with mouth when reaching for a new RJ11 connector to crimp on.
We tried to do it the IT way at first, but you should have seen the fit the HOA threw after the first stage ignition test. I don't see what the problem was, the neighbors have barbecues over at their place all the time. And don't get me started on all the whining over a little bit of harmless pressurized hydrazine in the garage. I mean we only leaked a few liters of the stuff.
It goes further than that. I like to think I'm pretty decent at explaining concepts to people who are interested in hearing them, at least if I have some time prepare, rather than going off the cuff.
But public debates have nothing to do with honestly communicating or explaining and everything to do with persuading people honestly or not. I just don't know how to compete with people who say what everyone wants to hear even though it is wrong, people that can stand up and sound legitimate even though every word that comes out of their mouth is fabricated crap.
You can explain that they are wrong, and how we know they are wrong. But in the end all the general public sees are two "experts" who disagree. They don't know who to believe and more often than not lean towards the person that confirms their existing preconceptions. This muddying of the water has implications greater than just my failure to convince people on a single issue. It creates the impression that scientists don't know what they are doing, that our understanding of things isn't improving with time, that a wild-ass guess is as valid as a well tested and supported scientific theory.
Or to put it in more comparable units, it will only take a fraction of a second for this bulb to save the amount energy used by the laser when compared to a standard bulb:
4 watt*seconds / (100watt - 60watt) = 1/10 second
From the point of view of a student I strongly agree with StandardCell. In my CS program I learned both VHDL (in our Digital Electronics class) and Verilog (in CPU Architecture). The familiarity of Verilog created more problems than it solved (especially for folks who didn't learn VHDL in their digital class), because people tried to think about it like it was C, and use it like C, it isn't C. Frankly, learning a new syntax is a piece of cake, compared to getting students with a background in programming to wrap their head around the concept of designing circuits. VHDL is structured in a way that forces you to think about the design from a hardware point of view. Verilog may be good for larger projects, that need the higher level of abstraction that it provides, but that abstraction is a stumbling block for beginners.
Not really. The advantages that religious organizations get in the US are pretty much the same that any non-profit organization can receive. For historical reasons, different types of organizations have to fill out different types of paperwork to apply for exempt status, but the same is true of our entire jumbled mess of a tax code. There is crap like the "Faith Based Initiatives", that really needs to go away but the core of tax-exempt status is pretty much the same as secular organizations.
and it saves me about $100/mo. on the power bill (I live in SoCal so power costs me .31/kwh)
Holy fuck. You are saving 320 kwh per month? I don't even want to know how much you are using. My total electric bill is usually less than that, and I don't think it has ever been over 500 kwh, even when I wasn't trying to save energy in the dead of summer in the middle of the desert.
Yeah, you can read them. And if you implement the codec they sue your ass. That isn't open.
Even if flash opened up completely, all the codecs it uses for video are still proprietary, and Adobe has no leverage to change that even if they wanted to. So at best opening up Flash removes the need for SVG and the new HTML 5 webapp features. It doesn't change the need for an open video codec at all.
Every laptop I have owned has taken just as long, if not longer, to come out of hibernation than to boot (suspend is a little faster). And for some reason it takes longer for networking to start working after coming out of hibernation compared to booting from scratch. And about a quarter of the time I come out of hibernation Client Side Caching ("Make files available offline") gets into this funky state causing any file access (offline or not) to take forever, requiring me to reboot anyway.
I use hibernation because I'm lazy and want to keep my applications open, but if I didn't, it would be just a quick and much less troublesome to just shutdown and reboot. Comparing the hibernate time of a computer to the "instant-on" time of most consumer electronic isn't even close.
I don't want to know how the main spring works, I just want to know what time it is.
FTFY
First, this is a business question you are asking in a techie forum, bad idea. You are running a business, possibly selling a business, go get yourself some business advisers
I disagree. Sure, he should absolutely talk to a lawyer and business adviser to help decide if this particular deal is a good one, what pitfalls need to be avoided, and how to negotiate the best deal.
But that isn't what was on his mind. He was asking which of these paths had more potential to make him happy and be more fulfilling for a techie. Other techies which have been in similar circumstances can answer that question far better than any business adviser could.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to provide us with rocks. Rocks which we can store in nitrogen purged safes, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Seriously. We have to go through the normal upgrade cycle each time MS Office is released, and I have not seen a single improvement to Office in the last 3 releases. And it's not just because Office is mature and has nothing left to fix. I have a list of things I would love to see done, the top of the list being to kill fucking MDI. For the sake of those oddballs like me that would like to do something completely unreasonable like display two spreadsheets on different screens. Or to display a tall-skinny spreadsheet and a short-wide spreadsheet, and have room to show different application in the left over space. I know, this is crazy talk. No one has monitors larger than 15 inches, and using applications in any mode but fullscreen is heresy. Next thing you know I'm going to be asking for the ability to overlap applications using a concept called "windowing".
So, if Gannett and McClatchy and some of the other big boys follow suit, you don't think that's going to cause massive problems for free aggregator* sites?
I think the effect on aggregator sites is going to be the same either way.
If News corp doesn't show a massive drop in profits (and they won't, since the online revenue is shit) then others will follow their lead.
And they'll still go out of business because their print revenues are dropping too. In order to survive they need to increase their online revenues - "our revenue only decreased slightly" isn't going to cut it.
In the end it's just accelerating the inevitable. Before each newspaper operated in a small little regional market. With the rise of the internet they are largely all competing in the same market, as a result the market is now oversaturated and there will be a massive pruning/consolidation. This is going to require changes in the pricing agreement between news feeds and newspapers (if the concept of separate newsfeeds and newspapers survives at all). But this is the only thing that is going to increase revenue - increasing the number of customers per site.
I think concern about aggregators destroying all "real journalism" is overstated. It has value and as such will stick around. Furthermore, I don't think blogs and other aggregators are hurting new sites. Even when they quote large portions of the story (which I don't approve of), they still link to it, and many readers follow and read that link. More, I believe, than would have had the blog not been written at all. Furthermore, readers often post links to alternate write-ups of the same subject increasing traffic further.
If ad-funded news dies, it won't be because of aggregators - in fact aggregator linking will continue to provide a strong incentive to stay ad-funded, if possible. If they die it will be because it is not possible to fund actual news gathering with advertisements. I personally don't think this will happen, but admittedly can't provide a good argument for that opinion.
--
My only real concern is the effects on local news. I don't know the actual break down of costs for these papers, or what content drives what percentage of purchases, but I think that local news gathering has long been subsidized by newsfeed driven sales. This is going away.
As a younger person, I would love to have a weekly paper intended to be a primary local new source. I don't care about all the national/world news, since I can find better sources elsewhere. Not enough happens to warrant a daily publication, nor do I have time to read a daily publication, and stuff that does have to be up-to-the-minute (stocks, weather, sports scores) is better suited to be online anyway. By writing weekly, coverage of a topic could be more full (rather than a quick update of what has happened since the last article) and could avoid that horrible in-side-out writing style that newspapers use now. The cost for journalists would stay the same (or preferably increase), but the costs for editing and printing would greatly decrease, and the cost for national feeds would disappear. Of course, since it was only weekly most people would not be willing to pay as much (I would, but I value quality news over quantity*). I don't know if this model would work out or not.
They are in a particularly bad place right now because a large percentage of their old customers aren't like me and still want all that national news along with stocks, weather, and sports scores delivered daily, so they can't shed those costs without risking alienating them. I'm very worried that TV "news" is going to be the only source of local content.
* Yeah, yeah what am I doing on slashdot then :P
If so people will pay for it. If you are just regurgitating AP and/or Reuters people will not. The Wall Street Journal and The Economist provide something unique, and have been successful with subscriptions (the fact that they cater to moneyed-folk helps too). To a lesser extent the New York Post and Christian Science Monitor provide unique information and may have luck transitioning to a subscription model.
As for the rest of the newpapers that News Corporation owns, yeah I don't think so. Some of the ones that I'm not familiar with may have sufficient unique content, but most of them don't look like it. Good luck making The Sun subscription only. The online portion of that magazine thrives on ignorant (or amused) blog linking, and would loose nearly all of it's traffic if it went subscription only.
The biggest thing that stands out to me is the fact that they made the keyboard smaller than the one on the Kindle 2 (less than half the height), when the device is much bigger. Which raises the question of why the keyboard needs to take up so much space on the Kindle 2 to begin with. Did they need the space for batteries / circuit boards, and just made the keyboard big since they had the room?
Anyway this looks interesting. I can't see myself buying an eBook reader just for paperbacks, but technical content is a whole different ball game. Just the ability to search is a big improvement over books. This is finally getting to that point. It is still more expensive than I'd pay and the refresh could be improved, but it is much closer than we were 5 years ago.
Returning to the MMR story, Wakefield has been widely discredited and hauled in front of the GMC and could be struck off.
Well I guess that's better than being hauled behind a GMC.
This headline totally should have been:
eBay Fakes Lower Craft of Tomb Raiding.
For those that were wondering how they got 160 characters into 128 bytes (6.4 bits/char), they didn't. The increased the length of the frame to 140 bytes, which is is 160 characters using a 7 bits/char. Curiosity forced me to look this up, expecting to find some snazzy compacting algorithm for a non power-of-two alphabet.