Interesting - but couldn't this be a correlation != causation issue? Easy, there. This sort of statement borders on being a Slashdot meme - it is trendy, always draws a reaction, and has almost nothing to do with the issue being discussed.
In practice, science comes down to observing correlation, and speculating at what might have caused it. For hard science, where events are reproducible and variables can be controlled, you can go back and repeat the experiment until you have a good grasp of what caused the correlation you observed.
This ain't that sort of science. Unless you are a seriously sick puppy, you aren't going to reproduce the circumstances that may have contributed to the decline in crime so that you can tease out causation. So you speculate about plausible explanations. Could be that the drop in crime is linked to decreased lead exposure. Or abortion rates (check out Freakonomics). Or a decrease in the number of people under the control of alien brain implants.
One of these things is not like the other - it isn't plausible. The sort of things you pose as possible explanations should be testable in a scientific manner, or borne out by very careful statistical analysis if you can't do the actual experiment.
Also it seems to imply that violent or criminal behavior is due to organic brain damage. Is that a given? Of course I haven't read the paper Sounds to me like you haven't read many papers ever. This is the sort of question that should be testable, has probably already tested, and is very likely to be discussed and cited heavily in this paper - at least if the authors want to be taken seriously. If they can't cite that sort of research, the lead exposure theory holds no more water than my alien brain implant theory.
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of office suites. Open Office was the office suite to use - it had two 'O's. Then the other guys came out this damn ooo build. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with the official OpenOffice.org build. That's three 'O's. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards forked it and went to four 'O's. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three 'O's. Suddenly, we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five 'O's.
Maybe you could use one of those schemes where you have to type in the fourth word on page 27 of the manual - you'll avoid all these problems with cracked keys...
Obvious now, but was it obvious in 1996 when they filed for it? YES. Painfully obvious.
I have prior art. It is called a "phone book".
You shouldn't be able to patent something that already exists just by putting it on the internet. There is no innovation there. As long as the patent system continues on its current money-grubbing descent into the realm of anti-innovation lawsuits, I can't help but think that the current state of the economy is a mirage. We, as a nation, don't produce anything and just sue each other. When the bottom drops out, a whole bunch of people are going to be up against the wall. I hope that list includes patent trolls like this yutz.
I want to see some very simple patent reforms.
1) You can't patent something unless it actually advances the current state of the field. Re-expressing existing data, like a phone book, in a new medium doesn't even come close.
2) You must make a good faith effort to develop the technology. I understand there could be funding issues for the little guy, yada, yada. We've all heard those arguments before. I'm talking about talking about IP firms that just buy and hold -- no benefit to society whatsoever.
3) You must defend your patents in a timely manner. Someone else in this thread was suggesting 90 days. That might be a bit short, but only just a bit. You sit on a patent waiting to see who you should sue, you should lose the patent.
4) I've seen Marshall, TX, crop up one too many times. Is one local judge with an agenda determining patent policy for the whole nation? No checks or balances there...
I choose not to break Godwin's Law because it's the right thing to do. Dude, you just meta-Godwin'ed yourself. Mentioning how you didn't mention the unmentionalbe didn't save you very much.
Quit tap-dancing around the issue with the PC names for he-who-must-not-be-named-on-internet-discussion-bo ards. Just come right out and say "Hitler!" While you're at it, make it personal and call the GP a Nazi. Either this is a flame, or it isn't. You can't half-ass these things.
I propose a corollary to Godwin's Law. As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of Godwin's law being mentioned approaches 1.
Anyone have a good way to recursively embed Godwin's Law within itself? That would save a lot of time fooling around with instances of meta-meta-Godwin laws being invoked, like this post.
I don't know what your graduate curriculum is like, but there's no way I would be able to get away with hiring someone else to do my thesis work My graduate work is in chemistry, and my lab is extremely tight-knit. About half of my thesis was done in collaboration with another grad student, four post-docs, and two professors. If I tried to get away with anything, any one of them would call me on it.
The second half of my thesis is totally original work. My primary advisor is the only one who even has a clue what it is I'm doing. But the material is way too esoteric for anyone else to write it up for me.
Never the less - if you are going to claim that you earned the title of Ph.D., I want to know that you earned it. The thought that you could buy a Ph.D. thesis really bakes my noodle.
And in response to the other posters in this thread - I back up at least daily. And no, I haven't forgotten the pain of pointless essays for classes that I didn't care about. But here's the trick. I only had to take a couple of those classes. I filled the rest of my undergraduate education with extra math, computer science, physics, etc.
You get out of your education as much as you are willing to put into it. If you don't want to write your essay... Don't! But as soon as you start buying your grade, you undermine my education. You make it harder for me to get the grade I deserve for the work I did.
It still isn't illegal for you to buy that essay. But it shouldn't surprise you when anyone who finds out that you did ends up despising you. And if you Uni's got an honor code? Sucks to be you. ______________
Good Cheating Story. After the organic chemistry test, the prof doesn't hand back exams. Says he's caught two people cheating, and if they are willing to come forward, he'll fail them for the test, but not for the class, and it won't go to the honor board.
As someone who is less than 48 hours away from a completed thesis Ph.D. thesis and a little over a week away from my defense, there is only one thing I have to say about this.
It's about damn time.
I hate to see that these services even exist.
I understand the cheating will always go on, at all levels of academics. The practice isn't against any laws, but it is nice to see Google not condoning something legal but flat out wrong.
Everything was locked down by MAC address and every printer was given a specific IP address. Even the pc ports were locked by MAC address.I wish more people would take basic measure like this. Even some minimal defense would prevent a lot of problems.
I collaborate with a government agency on some of my research (won't name names). They have a policy about no outside computers on the network. Unofficially, the IT guys are more than happy to look the other way, and will even leave an extra ethernet cable laying around, just as long as they don't see you plug in.
This is great for me, but would be horrible if anyone wanted to get into the network. Install a sniffer, plug right on in, and have more than enough login/password combos inside of 20 minutes.
Basic security like requiring a known MAC address would cut out a lot of the really easy 'hacks'.
Slashdot folk should be bright enough to know better. ALL viri are 100% immune to antibiotics. Antibiotics only work against germ based diseases.
Before you criticize too harshly, figure out what your are really talking about. There are antiviral compounds, including some that work agains flu. Whether they should be called antibiotic has to do with whether you define a virus as alive.
More importantly, the point has nothing to do with the article. The current vaccine for H5N1 has no effacicy against the newly discovered strain. Truth be told, it didn't even work very well aginst the older strains.
The real problem is this. The H5N1 vaccine isn't even available to the public yet - people are scared to artificially introduce the new subtype into humans. If there is a pandemic, are first line of defense should be a class of drugs known as adamantadines. Unfortunatly, because the Chinese include these in chicken feed, the H5N1 strains are already resistant to it.
The next line of defense is TamiFlu. It can't be produced fast enough at this point. In addition, some strains of flu have already developed resistance to it, too. Because of mismanagement of livestock in places like China (think chicken coops above pig pens) it is possible that we could see a pandemic that can't be vaccinated against, and can't be treated with antivirals.
Hope that we don't have a high-mortality strain like 1918, or a lot of people could end up dead.
Undergrads have much more incentive to cheat than grad students do. More classes, in a wide variety of subjects means you won't always have the time or ability to find the answer. Does that make it right? Hell, no.
Grad students on the other hand. Sure, you can cheat in your classes. Many people do. Makes no difference when it comes to doing your own original research, though. There is no one to cheat off of - you are expected to be a leading expert on your thesis topic. If you aren't, there is no fall back and you don't get a degree. Who cares what your grades were if you don't get the degree?
Anecdote:
An undergrad who worked in our lab took organic chemistry. The TAs would all stay up late to grade the exam and it would be handed back the next class.
After one exam, the prof gets up and announces that the test won't be handed back. He's caught someone cheating. If the cheaters will come forward, he will fail them for the test, but not for the whole class.
Hilarity ensues. 8 pairs of cheaters come forward. The prof, at something of a loss about what to do in this situation, can't hand tests back for nearly another week as he tries to sort the whole thing out.
I think if I ever become a prof, I may try something like this just to see who has a guilty conscience. These are the people who "want to be caught" - the ones who wouldn't normally cheat. Something like this might convince them not to ever again.
This is a very good and well thought out response. Fairly convincing as well (sources would have been nice, but are not necessary since the facts you cited have been pointed out in other posts and I've heard them before).
Sorry about the lack of sources. I research flu, so most of my sources are primary literature. Hard to site on slashdot. Most of what the media reports is actually fairly accurate on this topic - they mostly get it right. What you read in the news reflects most of what I read in the literature. My comment about H7N7 is one of the few pieces of the post that you might not have heard before.
However, I still don't think it will be as large of a disaster as the media predicts. Even if 100 million people die (world wide), that's still a small fraction of the world population of over 6 Billion. Is it tragic? Yes. Will it be a huge catastrophe to the country/world/human population? I don't think so. Should we prepare for it? Of course!
One person out of every 60 dies, and that's not a huge catastrophe? Keep in mind that it may have been as high as 100 million in 1918, but the world's population was quite a bit lower then. Even on the low end, 20 million would have been a significant fraction of the world's population.
If this thing hits, think about all the effects it will have. Lots of people will die. Are the bodies still infectious after they are dead? What do you do with that many dead bodies? Think of all the people who might live through it, but will get very sick. Do we have enough health care infrastructure to handle even a fraction of those people? To prevent infecting any more people than necessary, the whole world will shut down. No traffic in or out of your favorite city/state/nation. Do you have enough food? What about oil/gas reserves?
Not to mention anything else that might occur at the same time. If you devote all of your emergency response energy to dealing with flu, and a fire breaks out, can you get it put out before it spreads? Or a bad blizzard or tornado or whatever hits. These things happen all the time - we deal with them, clean up the aftermath, and move on. But put an event like that in the context of a pandemic that consumes your emergency resources, and see how bad it gets.
If you are pessimestic about how bad it could get, and it turns out not to be that bad, you got lucky. If you underestimate the impact, a whole lot more people die.
I don't think researchers and such should ignore the situation. I just don't think the general populous needs to freak out about it (at least not yet). Will I blame the government if they aren't prepared for this? No. I didn't blame them for not being prepared for Hurricane Katrina, so why would I blame them for this? They're response was a bit half-assed, but there's only so much they could have done (doesn't matter if it would have been a Democrat or Liberterian or whoever else in the White House--there are limitations to what our bloated government can do). Disasters happen and they're unpredicatble (to a degree), so why point the finger of blame? Blame is just an excuse to get out of doing things to fix things yourself.
You are right here - the general populous can't do anything about it at this point. Whipping everyone into a panic is sensationalist media at it's finest, and it sells. On the flip side though, I'd rather know what the dangers are. I just take everything in I hear from the media cum granulo salis.
If you've managed to avoid laying blame for Katrina, you've done better than most. But it would be much, much worse in a pandemic. We know that it's going to happen again at some point. We have much better world wide survelience, so we will probably have a warning well before it comes (H5N1 first crossed into humans in 1997 - you won't get a better warning then that). We know what the impact could be, because we
The media is always blowing something out of proportion as the next big threat to humanity
While this is *very* true, all it does is lower the signal/noise ratio of your nightly news. Most of the threats they discuss are not very likely to hit, and if they do, wouldn't really cause that much destruction.
Regular old human flu kills many thousands of people every year. SARS has killed a couple thousand - total. The media blew SARS out of proportion. Bird flu is a *much* larger issue.
Here's why. Flu mutates quickly, so there isn't any universial cure, or vaccine. Several times in the last century, an entirely new strain of flu has entered into the human population. When that happens, we have no immunity to it, and no vaccine. Until very recently, we had no antivirals to treat it.
Under those conditions, many more people die. Not just the very young or very old, but normally healthy people too.
1918 is the most famous example of this happening. Conservative estimates place the death toll at 20 million. I've seen estimates as high as 100 million. That's a lot of people.
1918 was an entirely avian flu - humans had no resistances to it. In 1957, then again in 1958, a hybrid flu, partially avain, partially human, entered the population. These killed many more people that the flu does in a normal year, but no where near what happened in 1918.
The current H5N1 avain flu scare is real news, because the avian virus has infected humans directly - it hasn't recombined with a human flu. Of the historical examples we have, that makes it most like 1918.
If we just write this off as sensationalist journalism, and it hits, the whole world is screwed. If a loved one dies in a pandemic, and the government hasn't done everything in it's power to prepare it, people like you will turn hypocrite and start screaming for the president's head. Hell, that'll probably happen no matter how prepared we are.
More importantly, with flu it is a question of when, not if. Even if the H5N1 strain fades out and never amounts to anything, there are already more strains waiting in the wings. H7N7 is another strain that has jumped directly from avains to humans in recent years. Its not as wide spread, it's mortality rate is lower. But if it mutates, and learns to jump from human to human...
Just because the media is sensationalist, it doesn't mean that you can't die from $THREAT_OF_THE_WEEK (you probably won't). Just because bird flu gets lumped in with SARS, bees and anthrax, it doesn't mean it isn't a real threat (it is a very real threat). Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me (I've taken too long to write this post already - time go back into hiding).
Brown mentions HBHG explicitly, and the character name Leigh Teabing is an anagram of Leigh and Baigent, the authors. He made no secret of using HBHG as source material.
This is truly depressing news. Any science that makes headlines and later turns out to be fraud damages the reputation and credability of science in general.
When the research claims a medical breakthrough, the backlash is even worse. The public ignores most science that doesn't impact their daily lives. Medicine is one of the few areas of science that is almost guarenteed to impact an average joe at some point, and as a result, people pay very close attention.
Human cloning and stem cell research are guarenteed to be headline topics any time a new study is released, and this sets the entire field back several years - both in terms of credability and in terms of research. It forces everyone in the field to step back and reevaluate everything they think they know.
Worse yet, it forces the public to be distrustful of all science.
They've had these sequences in plasmids for years. That doesn't make news.
They used the plasmids to make a whole bunch of RNA, transfected it into a cell line, and let the virus reassemble itself. They now have viable 1918 virus. That *is* news.
This is potentially nasty, but if it got out of the lab, it probably wouldn't be a 1918 redo. Most everyone on earth has been exposed to the currently circulating H1N1 viruses (same type as 1918), so everyone has some immunity to the old virus.
You want something to be afraid of, look at the asian bird flu. I collaborate with the flu branch at the CDC, and its what they worry about. That is the virus with the potential to cause a 1918-like pandemic.
I know the BSD's are pretty secure, but what if this gets hacked?
Your server is toast. Your toast is burned. Your toasty server may burn down the house.
Any remote exploit is a potential fire hazard!
All around the country, coast to coast, people ask what I like most. Now I don't like to brag, and I dont like to boast, I just tell them, I like toast. Web toast.
Everyone I work with uses Windows - it's what everyone knows, and quite a bit of the (proprietary scientific) software that we use is Windows only. It suits me fine for basic graphing, presentations, etc.
For heavy duty data analysis, bioinformatics programming, compiling data from several sources into one sorted file, intensive modeling, or any other problem that would take hours by hand but several minutes with a script, I maintain one linux installation. It didn't take my coworkers long to figure out that they could do a few things much more efficiently on my machine, and that for some things, they should just come and ask me if I could write the program.
As I get better at admining it, I'll open up SSH so I can do some work from home, transfer files, provide accounts to coworkers who are already savvy enough to still use the old university unix servers to check email, and probably build some sort of network jukebox in so I don't have to tote my CDs up to the lab.
The point here is that I pick the best tool for the job. Neither Windows or Unix fits the bill all the time. Sometimes neither does - there is some really nice Mac only stuff out there. Fortunatly, since OSX came out, I can sit down at a Mac and pull up a unix prompt - I know what to do with that...
It's shit like this that makes me want to get out of computers and get into chemistry.
Don't bother jumping ship on the computer industry for chemistry over patents. The world of chemistry is just as bad.
Specific reactions, intermediates, products, linkages and a host of other things are patented and just as much of a pain as any software issue you read about here on/.
Sometimes, it's worse. Open Source has not made it's way into wet chemistry. Sure, there are plenty of OS programs for chemistry, but the best of those are still under IP and quite expensive.
For instance - I am using a chemistry design package right at the moment. The full version costs $6,000 US for a single seat. I am seriously considering rewriting a good chunck of it on my own - the GUI won't be as nice, but I'll be able to customize it for another project I'm working on, get the same basic functionality, and avoid paying through the nose.
I can't do that with the wet chemistry. It would be a much large time and resource commitment, and the laws as to how much you have to change a molecule to side-step an existing patent are not very well defined.
Easiest solution - do novel work. If you live on the bleeding edge in any industry, you don't have to contend with patents, because no one has done what you are working on.
Google the company name probably comes from the noun google, meaning a large number - specifically a one followed by 100 zeros.
You can try Googling (the verb) for that, but you have to be careful, as most links that say 'google' in them are about, well, Google...
Seriously, a google is 1*10^100. I believe it was named by some math guy's kid somewhere along the line. Google probably choose it to suggest that they were going to search a large number of pages on the internet. At last count, they were around 3*10^9 - only 10^91 more pages to go before Google will let you search a google of pages for information about the verb google vs the noun google. That's a lot of google...huh!
An interesting argument, and probably the one that gets used in court. It has one major flaw in it, though. The sequence in question, the one with all the relevant info, does occur naturally. Not in the DNA, but in the mRNA. DNA is copied to mRNA, and the mRNA is spliced to form the cleaned up version. Using a reverse transcriptase to turn it back into DNA is cool, but not novel, and not all reverse transcriptases are patented.
The 'randomness', or introns, are not actually part of the gene, so the legalistic dodge should end up full of holes if anyone bothers to ask their friendly neighborhood biochemist or molecular biologist.
As the parent to this pointed out, the patent has to have an inventive step or some other novelty, or (straight from the first article), must be "novel," "nonobvious" and "utilitarian."
The idea of a gene has been around since the 1800's, thanks to one Gregor Mendel, and the knowledge of where those genes were and how they were stored has been around since ~1950, due to the work of Watson, Crick, and a few others who never get any credit. Methods to sequence the DNA has been around almost as long as we have understood what DNA was. There is nothing novel about finding a gene.
It's time to look at what patent law was originally meant to do. It was never meant to stop research and innovation - it's supposed to protect innovation by allowing people who discover something new to benefit from it. I would consider methods of treatment for genetic diseases to be fertile ground for innovation and patents galore by this standard of what is patentable.
Finding a gene is not new or nonobvious in any way. We all know the genes are there. Make the gene sequences public, but keep treatments patentable. This ensures that research and innovation are allowed to go forward, but innovations in treatment are rewarded. This is the way the system was supposed to work, and would still work if the supreme court ever stopped to think about the law they are supposed to be upholding, instead of being impressed by the big name lawyers biotech companies hire every time this ends up in court.
If the US sets an example, it will have a big impact on the international community as well. Don't hinder the research community, as their efforts will benefit the global community. Do allow patenting of treatments, so that it is still possible to profit from a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
In practice, science comes down to observing correlation, and speculating at what might have caused it. For hard science, where events are reproducible and variables can be controlled, you can go back and repeat the experiment until you have a good grasp of what caused the correlation you observed.
This ain't that sort of science. Unless you are a seriously sick puppy, you aren't going to reproduce the circumstances that may have contributed to the decline in crime so that you can tease out causation. So you speculate about plausible explanations. Could be that the drop in crime is linked to decreased lead exposure. Or abortion rates (check out Freakonomics). Or a decrease in the number of people under the control of alien brain implants.
One of these things is not like the other - it isn't plausible. The sort of things you pose as possible explanations should be testable in a scientific manner, or borne out by very careful statistical analysis if you can't do the actual experiment. Also it seems to imply that violent or criminal behavior is due to organic brain damage. Is that a given? Of course I haven't read the paper Sounds to me like you haven't read many papers ever. This is the sort of question that should be testable, has probably already tested, and is very likely to be discussed and cited heavily in this paper - at least if the authors want to be taken seriously. If they can't cite that sort of research, the lead exposure theory holds no more water than my alien brain implant theory.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of office suites. Open Office was the office suite to use - it had two 'O's. Then the other guys came out this damn ooo build. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with the official OpenOffice.org build. That's three 'O's. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards forked it and went to four 'O's. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three 'O's. Suddenly, we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five 'O's.
Maybe you could use one of those schemes where you have to type in the fourth word on page 27 of the manual - you'll avoid all these problems with cracked keys...
I have prior art. It is called a "phone book".
You shouldn't be able to patent something that already exists just by putting it on the internet. There is no innovation there. As long as the patent system continues on its current money-grubbing descent into the realm of anti-innovation lawsuits, I can't help but think that the current state of the economy is a mirage. We, as a nation, don't produce anything and just sue each other. When the bottom drops out, a whole bunch of people are going to be up against the wall. I hope that list includes patent trolls like this yutz.
I want to see some very simple patent reforms.
1) You can't patent something unless it actually advances the current state of the field. Re-expressing existing data, like a phone book, in a new medium doesn't even come close.
2) You must make a good faith effort to develop the technology. I understand there could be funding issues for the little guy, yada, yada. We've all heard those arguments before. I'm talking about talking about IP firms that just buy and hold -- no benefit to society whatsoever.
3) You must defend your patents in a timely manner. Someone else in this thread was suggesting 90 days. That might be a bit short, but only just a bit. You sit on a patent waiting to see who you should sue, you should lose the patent.
4) I've seen Marshall, TX, crop up one too many times. Is one local judge with an agenda determining patent policy for the whole nation? No checks or balances there...
Quit tap-dancing around the issue with the PC names for he-who-must-not-be-named-on-internet-discussion-b
I propose a corollary to Godwin's Law. As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of Godwin's law being mentioned approaches 1.
Anyone have a good way to recursively embed Godwin's Law within itself? That would save a lot of time fooling around with instances of meta-meta-Godwin laws being invoked, like this post.
The second half of my thesis is totally original work. My primary advisor is the only one who even has a clue what it is I'm doing. But the material is way too esoteric for anyone else to write it up for me.
Never the less - if you are going to claim that you earned the title of Ph.D., I want to know that you earned it. The thought that you could buy a Ph.D. thesis really bakes my noodle.
And in response to the other posters in this thread - I back up at least daily. And no, I haven't forgotten the pain of pointless essays for classes that I didn't care about. But here's the trick. I only had to take a couple of those classes. I filled the rest of my undergraduate education with extra math, computer science, physics, etc.
You get out of your education as much as you are willing to put into it. If you don't want to write your essay... Don't! But as soon as you start buying your grade, you undermine my education. You make it harder for me to get the grade I deserve for the work I did.
It still isn't illegal for you to buy that essay. But it shouldn't surprise you when anyone who finds out that you did ends up despising you. And if you Uni's got an honor code? Sucks to be you.
______________
Good Cheating Story. After the organic chemistry test, the prof doesn't hand back exams. Says he's caught two people cheating, and if they are willing to come forward, he'll fail them for the test, but not for the class, and it won't go to the honor board.
10 people came forward.
Whoops...
As someone who is less than 48 hours away from a completed thesis Ph.D. thesis and a little over a week away from my defense, there is only one thing I have to say about this.
It's about damn time.
I hate to see that these services even exist.
I understand the cheating will always go on, at all levels of academics. The practice isn't against any laws, but it is nice to see Google not condoning something legal but flat out wrong.
Everything was locked down by MAC address and every printer was given a specific IP address. Even the pc ports were locked by MAC address.I wish more people would take basic measure like this. Even some minimal defense would prevent a lot of problems.
I collaborate with a government agency on some of my research (won't name names). They have a policy about no outside computers on the network. Unofficially, the IT guys are more than happy to look the other way, and will even leave an extra ethernet cable laying around, just as long as they don't see you plug in.
This is great for me, but would be horrible if anyone wanted to get into the network. Install a sniffer, plug right on in, and have more than enough login/password combos inside of 20 minutes.
Basic security like requiring a known MAC address would cut out a lot of the really easy 'hacks'.
Before you criticize too harshly, figure out what your are really talking about. There are antiviral compounds, including some that work agains flu. Whether they should be called antibiotic has to do with whether you define a virus as alive.
More importantly, the point has nothing to do with the article. The current vaccine for H5N1 has no effacicy against the newly discovered strain. Truth be told, it didn't even work very well aginst the older strains.
The real problem is this. The H5N1 vaccine isn't even available to the public yet - people are scared to artificially introduce the new subtype into humans. If there is a pandemic, are first line of defense should be a class of drugs known as adamantadines. Unfortunatly, because the Chinese include these in chicken feed, the H5N1 strains are already resistant to it.
The next line of defense is TamiFlu. It can't be produced fast enough at this point. In addition, some strains of flu have already developed resistance to it, too. Because of mismanagement of livestock in places like China (think chicken coops above pig pens) it is possible that we could see a pandemic that can't be vaccinated against, and can't be treated with antivirals.
Hope that we don't have a high-mortality strain like 1918, or a lot of people could end up dead.
Undergrads have much more incentive to cheat than grad students do. More classes, in a wide variety of subjects means you won't always have the time or ability to find the answer. Does that make it right? Hell, no.
Grad students on the other hand. Sure, you can cheat in your classes. Many people do. Makes no difference when it comes to doing your own original research, though. There is no one to cheat off of - you are expected to be a leading expert on your thesis topic. If you aren't, there is no fall back and you don't get a degree. Who cares what your grades were if you don't get the degree?
Anecdote:
An undergrad who worked in our lab took organic chemistry. The TAs would all stay up late to grade the exam and it would be handed back the next class.
After one exam, the prof gets up and announces that the test won't be handed back. He's caught someone cheating. If the cheaters will come forward, he will fail them for the test, but not for the whole class.
Hilarity ensues. 8 pairs of cheaters come forward. The prof, at something of a loss about what to do in this situation, can't hand tests back for nearly another week as he tries to sort the whole thing out.
I think if I ever become a prof, I may try something like this just to see who has a guilty conscience. These are the people who "want to be caught" - the ones who wouldn't normally cheat. Something like this might convince them not to ever again.
Sorry about the lack of sources. I research flu, so most of my sources are primary literature. Hard to site on slashdot. Most of what the media reports is actually fairly accurate on this topic - they mostly get it right. What you read in the news reflects most of what I read in the literature. My comment about H7N7 is one of the few pieces of the post that you might not have heard before.
One person out of every 60 dies, and that's not a huge catastrophe? Keep in mind that it may have been as high as 100 million in 1918, but the world's population was quite a bit lower then. Even on the low end, 20 million would have been a significant fraction of the world's population.
If this thing hits, think about all the effects it will have. Lots of people will die. Are the bodies still infectious after they are dead? What do you do with that many dead bodies? Think of all the people who might live through it, but will get very sick. Do we have enough health care infrastructure to handle even a fraction of those people? To prevent infecting any more people than necessary, the whole world will shut down. No traffic in or out of your favorite city/state/nation. Do you have enough food? What about oil/gas reserves?
Not to mention anything else that might occur at the same time. If you devote all of your emergency response energy to dealing with flu, and a fire breaks out, can you get it put out before it spreads? Or a bad blizzard or tornado or whatever hits. These things happen all the time - we deal with them, clean up the aftermath, and move on. But put an event like that in the context of a pandemic that consumes your emergency resources, and see how bad it gets.
If you are pessimestic about how bad it could get, and it turns out not to be that bad, you got lucky. If you underestimate the impact, a whole lot more people die.
You are right here - the general populous can't do anything about it at this point. Whipping everyone into a panic is sensationalist media at it's finest, and it sells. On the flip side though, I'd rather know what the dangers are. I just take everything in I hear from the media cum granulo salis.
If you've managed to avoid laying blame for Katrina, you've done better than most. But it would be much, much worse in a pandemic. We know that it's going to happen again at some point. We have much better world wide survelience, so we will probably have a warning well before it comes (H5N1 first crossed into humans in 1997 - you won't get a better warning then that). We know what the impact could be, because we
While this is *very* true, all it does is lower the signal/noise ratio of your nightly news. Most of the threats they discuss are not very likely to hit, and if they do, wouldn't really cause that much destruction.
Regular old human flu kills many thousands of people every year. SARS has killed a couple thousand - total. The media blew SARS out of proportion. Bird flu is a *much* larger issue.
Here's why. Flu mutates quickly, so there isn't any universial cure, or vaccine. Several times in the last century, an entirely new strain of flu has entered into the human population. When that happens, we have no immunity to it, and no vaccine. Until very recently, we had no antivirals to treat it.
Under those conditions, many more people die. Not just the very young or very old, but normally healthy people too.
1918 is the most famous example of this happening. Conservative estimates place the death toll at 20 million. I've seen estimates as high as 100 million. That's a lot of people.
1918 was an entirely avian flu - humans had no resistances to it. In 1957, then again in 1958, a hybrid flu, partially avain, partially human, entered the population. These killed many more people that the flu does in a normal year, but no where near what happened in 1918.
The current H5N1 avain flu scare is real news, because the avian virus has infected humans directly - it hasn't recombined with a human flu. Of the historical examples we have, that makes it most like 1918.
If we just write this off as sensationalist journalism, and it hits, the whole world is screwed. If a loved one dies in a pandemic, and the government hasn't done everything in it's power to prepare it, people like you will turn hypocrite and start screaming for the president's head. Hell, that'll probably happen no matter how prepared we are.
More importantly, with flu it is a question of when, not if. Even if the H5N1 strain fades out and never amounts to anything, there are already more strains waiting in the wings. H7N7 is another strain that has jumped directly from avains to humans in recent years. Its not as wide spread, it's mortality rate is lower. But if it mutates, and learns to jump from human to human...
Just because the media is sensationalist, it doesn't mean that you can't die from $THREAT_OF_THE_WEEK (you probably won't). Just because bird flu gets lumped in with SARS, bees and anthrax, it doesn't mean it isn't a real threat (it is a very real threat). Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me (I've taken too long to write this post already - time go back into hiding).
if you site your sources.
Brown mentions HBHG explicitly, and the character name Leigh Teabing is an anagram of Leigh and Baigent, the authors. He made no secret of using HBHG as source material.
Read it here.
This is a money grab attempt.
This is truly depressing news. Any science that makes headlines and later turns out to be fraud damages the reputation and credability of science in general.
When the research claims a medical breakthrough, the backlash is even worse. The public ignores most science that doesn't impact their daily lives. Medicine is one of the few areas of science that is almost guarenteed to impact an average joe at some point, and as a result, people pay very close attention.
Human cloning and stem cell research are guarenteed to be headline topics any time a new study is released, and this sets the entire field back several years - both in terms of credability and in terms of research. It forces everyone in the field to step back and reevaluate everything they think they know.
Worse yet, it forces the public to be distrustful of all science.
Check again.
They've had these sequences in plasmids for years. That doesn't make news.
They used the plasmids to make a whole bunch of RNA, transfected it into a cell line, and let the virus reassemble itself. They now have viable 1918 virus. That *is* news.
This is potentially nasty, but if it got out of the lab, it probably wouldn't be a 1918 redo. Most everyone on earth has been exposed to the currently circulating H1N1 viruses (same type as 1918), so everyone has some immunity to the old virus.
You want something to be afraid of, look at the asian bird flu. I collaborate with the flu branch at the CDC, and its what they worry about. That is the virus with the potential to cause a 1918-like pandemic.
I know the BSD's are pretty secure, but what if this gets hacked?
Your server is toast.
Your toast is burned.
Your toasty server may burn down the house.
Any remote exploit is a potential fire hazard!
All around the country,
coast to coast,
people ask what I like most.
Now I don't like to brag,
and I dont like to boast,
I just tell them,
I like toast.
Web toast.
Museum of the Future announced in the past! See yesterday's innovations today!
Now, where did I put that 'News at 11:00' cliche - it was just here...
(That event occured last night, 11/10/04, according to the announcement linked in the article.)
"Stupid Americans, going to Mars. If they want cold and barren, they should just go to Siberia. At least they have vodka in Siberia."Er, sorry for that. I'll stop now.
I picked some of these up (along with some stuffed microbes) when I was down at the CDC last winter. (Doing flu research does have some benefits...)
The cards are kind of cool, but can be extremely gross or revolting. It's the kind of thing I wish I'd know about as a kid.
Everyone I work with uses Windows - it's what everyone knows, and quite a bit of the (proprietary scientific) software that we use is Windows only. It suits me fine for basic graphing, presentations, etc.
For heavy duty data analysis, bioinformatics programming, compiling data from several sources into one sorted file, intensive modeling, or any other problem that would take hours by hand but several minutes with a script, I maintain one linux installation. It didn't take my coworkers long to figure out that they could do a few things much more efficiently on my machine, and that for some things, they should just come and ask me if I could write the program.
As I get better at admining it, I'll open up SSH so I can do some work from home, transfer files, provide accounts to coworkers who are already savvy enough to still use the old university unix servers to check email, and probably build some sort of network jukebox in so I don't have to tote my CDs up to the lab.
The point here is that I pick the best tool for the job. Neither Windows or Unix fits the bill all the time. Sometimes neither does - there is some really nice Mac only stuff out there. Fortunatly, since OSX came out, I can sit down at a Mac and pull up a unix prompt - I know what to do with that...
Don't bother jumping ship on the computer industry for chemistry over patents. The world of chemistry is just as bad.
Specific reactions, intermediates, products, linkages and a host of other things are patented and just as much of a pain as any software issue you read about here on
Sometimes, it's worse. Open Source has not made it's way into wet chemistry. Sure, there are plenty of OS programs for chemistry, but the best of those are still under IP and quite expensive.
For instance - I am using a chemistry design package right at the moment. The full version costs $6,000 US for a single seat. I am seriously considering rewriting a good chunck of it on my own - the GUI won't be as nice, but I'll be able to customize it for another project I'm working on, get the same basic functionality, and avoid paying through the nose.
I can't do that with the wet chemistry. It would be a much large time and resource commitment, and the laws as to how much you have to change a molecule to side-step an existing patent are not very well defined.
Easiest solution - do novel work. If you live on the bleeding edge in any industry, you don't have to contend with patents, because no one has done what you are working on.
Google the company name probably comes from the noun google, meaning a large number - specifically a one followed by 100 zeros.
You can try Googling (the verb) for that, but you have to be careful, as most links that say 'google' in them are about, well, Google...
Seriously, a google is 1*10^100. I believe it was named by some math guy's kid somewhere along the line. Google probably choose it to suggest that they were going to search a large number of pages on the internet. At last count, they were around 3*10^9 - only 10^91 more pages to go before Google will let you search a google of pages for information about the verb google vs the noun google. That's a lot of google...huh!
-Vornzog-
An interesting argument, and probably the one that gets used in court. It has one major flaw in it, though. The sequence in question, the one with all the relevant info, does occur naturally. Not in the DNA, but in the mRNA. DNA is copied to mRNA, and the mRNA is spliced to form the cleaned up version. Using a reverse transcriptase to turn it back into DNA is cool, but not novel, and not all reverse transcriptases are patented.
The 'randomness', or introns, are not actually part of the gene, so the legalistic dodge should end up full of holes if anyone bothers to ask their friendly neighborhood biochemist or molecular biologist.
-V-
As the parent to this pointed out, the patent has to have an inventive step or some other novelty, or (straight from the first article), must be "novel," "nonobvious" and "utilitarian."
The idea of a gene has been around since the 1800's, thanks to one Gregor Mendel, and the knowledge of where those genes were and how they were stored has been around since ~1950, due to the work of Watson, Crick, and a few others who never get any credit. Methods to sequence the DNA has been around almost as long as we have understood what DNA was. There is nothing novel about finding a gene.
It's time to look at what patent law was originally meant to do. It was never meant to stop research and innovation - it's supposed to protect innovation by allowing people who discover something new to benefit from it. I would consider methods of treatment for genetic diseases to be fertile ground for innovation and patents galore by this standard of what is patentable.
Finding a gene is not new or nonobvious in any way. We all know the genes are there. Make the gene sequences public, but keep treatments patentable. This ensures that research and innovation are allowed to go forward, but innovations in treatment are rewarded. This is the way the system was supposed to work, and would still work if the supreme court ever stopped to think about the law they are supposed to be upholding, instead of being impressed by the big name lawyers biotech companies hire every time this ends up in court.
If the US sets an example, it will have a big impact on the international community as well. Don't hinder the research community, as their efforts will benefit the global community. Do allow patenting of treatments, so that it is still possible to profit from a good idea.
-V-
What I would like to see is power management good enough to run this on a kinetics style watch. Linux, powered by your body motions.
Then, when they get a wireless lan card for this baby...
Vornzog
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.