It can actually be less invasive than standard surgery.
MRI-guided surgical manipulators of one kind or another are also being developed for other applications (e.g., the lab working on the breast cancer system also has funding to develop a brain surgery device).
'If surgeons can't stick a probe into a breast cancer tumor and just burn it today then why could they in a year or two? Often times there has to be a masectomy because...well because you can't just stick a probe in and burn it or remove it any other way really. If a robot can supposedly do it, why can't aren't all surgeons using this method right now?'
Because it takes large clinical trials to establish if this method is as effective as (e.g.) excising the lump by surgery ('lumpectomy') followed by radiation treatment, just as it previously took a large trial to show that lumpectomy could be as effective as mastectomy in many situations. The 'burning' technique used here (RFA) is one of several experimental therapies being studied for clinical effectiveness, as described in this (now slightly dated) article:
And no, a robot isn't required for RFA (the system being built at the University of Maryland is really a surgeon-controlled remote manipulator with haptic feedback and live MRI imaging).
'The goal of this project is to develop a novel teleoperated robotic system with haptic (sense of touch) feedback capability that will provide accurate feedback to the physician performing Breast biopsy (Bx) and/or Radio-frequency ablation (RFA) under continuous Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Some of the primary challenges of this project include: development of a compact robot manipulator, actuation and sensing that is MRI compatible, efficient use of MRI image sequences to guide the Bx needle and/or RFA probe accurately using adaptive control schemes that incorporate soft-tissue properties as the needle/probe traverses the tissue, and an intuitive user-interface which will provide real-time MRI images and Bx needle/RFA probe tracking with respect to the tumor (target) location.'
You don't have to wait for any cells to grow to make use of the biopsy (it can be assessed directly), but obviously a pathologist will have to examine the sample under a microscope before a treatment decision is made.
'That's almost 200 pounds for every man woman and child in the UK.'
Which would have seemed like a lot of money a couple of weeks ago. But today we can just add it on to the 8000 pounds it may end up costing every man, woman and child to back the bank bailout plan:
Perhaps instead of spying on UK citizens, the government should have spent a few quid keeping a closer eye on the respectable financial institutions whose irresponsible behaviour has caused the sort of damage to the economy that terrorists can only dream about...
'Sources close to the Chinese government were quick to stress that the timing of this announcement and the recent surprise appointment of US software developer Richard M Stallman as Governer of Sichuan Province are entirely coincidental'.
'"As the grid is ready but no data is expected to be produced by the LHC for the next few months, engineers have received permission to temporarily fill all 15 petabytes with adult material in an effort to test the infrastructure."'
The problem, of course, is what to do with all this 'material' when the collider eventually starts producing data. It's now well known that Tim Berners-Lee hurriedly developed the Web within months of the LEP going on line in 1989, which was causing an equally serious storage problem by the standards of the time. In a desperate attempt to free up space on the servers, he succeeded in creating a distributed global system capable of storing CERN's vast collection of Ginger Lynn GIFs, Adult VHS screen captures, and dubious ASCII art.
'How, exactly, does a global pandemic affect a network?'
Basically, it comes down to all the 'viral' licenses that govern much of the software the internet runs on. To put it simply, the net behaves in much the same way as a series of tubes, which eventually become clogged up as the licenses proliferate. Luckily, Al Gore designed the Internet to survive even a nuclear war, so even a viral pandemic (interpreted by the net as censorship) can be routed around.
'Why would they need network management tools in case of such an event?'
This is of course the correct and universal response of ISPs to all eventualities. Too many people taking up that loss leader monthly deal? - Network Management. Customers actually using the bandwidth they've paid for? - Network Management. Rampant piracy detected by your friends at the RIAA? - Network Management. Catastrophic civilization-threatening hyperplague? - Network Management.
'I'm sure it'll be super duper fast with a 1500$ case and 2 raptor drives in a raid 0 config.'
Yes, but does it come with the 'little Cray monitor' from Neuromancer? Never mind flying cars, I want my cyberpunk-style consumer electronics casually branded with cutting-edge 80s tech company names now!
Consumer: "Well, Sony weren't very helpful, but the great thing about PlayAnywhere is I'm not limited to a single supplier! Let's see who else supports these files...Great! Microsoft is a fully paid up member! Now, where's that new Zune I won in the McCain For America raffle..? OK, *Squirting files to device*...'Incompatible format!' WTF?"
Consumer: "Hey Microsoft! It says right here you fully support the PlayAnywhere Ecosystem! Why won't my files work?"
Microsoft: "Oh come on kid. Don't you get it?"
Comsumer: "?"
Microsoft: "Look, every couple of years they come out with one of these schemes, and we always sign up to it just to fuck with Apple. But we obviously wouldn't be caught dead using it ourselves! Tell you what, how about we give you a free upgrade from Vista to Mojave to thank you for your feedback?"
isn't the usual lame and intellectually dishonest call to 'teach the controversy', agrees that [intelligent design theories] 'are not the products of scientific reasoning', and mentions that [questions about creationism and intelligent design] 'can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works'. Although he has (and respects other) religious beliefs, he makes it very clear that evolution is 'the central concept in biological sciences, providing a conceptual framework that unifies every aspect of the life sciences into a single coherent discipline'. The question is, how does a science teacher get this concept across to students who think their religious beliefs conflict with the curriculum?
'So far, the list includes several big-name brands in computers, networking and consumer electronics, but there are some glaring absences, including Apple'
FAIL!
If the lipstick isn't even compatible with your favourite breed of pig, their silly little 'coalition' is just as doomed as all the others before it.
'but what if tomorrow Steve releases a press release apologizing to Vista users but blames it squarely on Vista "oh sorry something in our new version invoked a buggy piece of vista and we had to work around it."'
No, that's not why they did it. It crashes so that anyone who just bought the largest capacity iPod won't find out it's 40Gb smaller than the previous model. (Except Mac uses, of course, but they'll just get all excited about how much thinner it is now, while stroking their MacBook Airs dreamily with the other hand. XP users haven't upgraded their Diamond Rios yet).
Re:Will you ever learn?
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
'At that point, one lowly scientist (possible of Asian origin) will still be working in his office - despite regular calls of 'Hu! It's all fine, come out here and have some champagne'. He shouts out 'In a minute, I'm just checking something' Then to himself 'This is wrong. This is all wrong. Planck's constant shouldn't be varying like that.''
Or on the eve of the big experiment, an engineer with a dubious euro accent has just finished talking to a colleague ('see you when you get back') and is making some final adjustments to the magnets or something ('we don't want any hitches tomorrow'), when suddenly...
I like Terry Pratchett's take on this sort of 'low risk' experiment (from 'The Science of Discworld'):
"Well... in the unlikely event of it going seriously wrong, it... wouldn't just blow up the university, sir."
"What would it blow up, pray?"
"Er... everything, sir."
"Everything there is, you mean?"
"Within a radius of about fifty thousand miles out into space, sir, yes. According to Hex it'd happen instantaneously. We wouldn't even know about it."
"And the odds of this are...?"
"About fifty to one, sir."
The wizards relaxed.
"That's pretty safe. I wouldn't bet on a horse at those odds," said the Senior Wrangler.
'I'd love to see the results of removing Junk DNA from a human's genome, and then pump it into an egg and grow it up all normal like and see what kind of walking cancer emerges.'
Well, Nature has (sort of) done this experiment already. The Fugu (pufferfish) genome has a highly 'compressed' genome, with about the same number of genes as mammals, but a much smaller complement of non-coding DNA:
So it's certainly possible for an 'advanced' species to survive without the 'burden' of much of this material (obviously the regulatory elements are still required, but a lot of the highly repetitive stuff seems to be dispensable). Of course the 'junk DNA' may still confer evolutionary advantages (as the linked article put it: 'it may in fact be the clay from which evolution fashions morphogenetic changes'), and perhaps it says something that mammals have in general evolved in what most of us would regard as a much more interesting way than pufferfish...
Just stick them on an Archival Gold CD, and in 25 years post this to Slashdot:
"I've been tasked with finding a way to read digitally stored photographs buried in a small underground time capsule 25 years ago. It looks like they used a steel vessel, welded closed..."
No, the IOC is going to keep quiet about this one. Given the recent
revelations about CGI fireworks,
fake sports
fans, dubious pianos,
and the substituted singer,
they're desperately hoping we won't find out that this is the ACTUAL stadium...
Sheriff Colin Miller added: "In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a 'cycle-sexualist'. "
Slashdot Mirror
The RFA ('burning') technique is in fact already being applied to certain types of cancer in the kidney, liver and lung:
http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/default.asp?page=23208
It can actually be less invasive than standard surgery.
MRI-guided surgical manipulators of one kind or another are also being developed for other applications (e.g., the lab working on the breast cancer system also has funding to develop a brain surgery device).
'If surgeons can't stick a probe into a breast cancer tumor and just burn it today then why could they in a year or two? Often times there has to be a masectomy because...well because you can't just stick a probe in and burn it or remove it any other way really. If a robot can supposedly do it, why can't aren't all surgeons using this method right now?'
Because it takes large clinical trials to establish if this method is as effective as (e.g.) excising the lump by surgery ('lumpectomy') followed by radiation treatment, just as it previously took a large trial to show that lumpectomy could be as effective as mastectomy in many situations. The 'burning' technique used here (RFA) is one of several experimental therapies being studied for clinical effectiveness, as described in this (now slightly dated) article:
http://www.cancernews.com/articles/breastcancertherapies.htm
And no, a robot isn't required for RFA (the system being built at the University of Maryland is really a surgeon-controlled remote manipulator with haptic feedback and live MRI imaging).
There's a better description of the technology from the lab involved here:
http://rams.umd.edu/html/news.shtml#nihr01
'The goal of this project is to develop a novel teleoperated robotic system with haptic (sense of touch) feedback capability that will provide accurate feedback to the physician performing Breast biopsy (Bx) and/or Radio-frequency ablation (RFA) under continuous Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Some of the primary challenges of this project include: development of a compact robot manipulator, actuation and sensing that is MRI compatible, efficient use of MRI image sequences to guide the Bx needle and/or RFA probe accurately using adaptive control schemes that incorporate soft-tissue properties as the needle/probe traverses the tissue, and an intuitive user-interface which will provide real-time MRI images and Bx needle/RFA probe tracking with respect to the tumor (target) location.'
You don't have to wait for any cells to grow to make use of the biopsy (it can be assessed directly), but obviously a pathologist will have to examine the sample under a microscope before a treatment decision is made.
'That's almost 200 pounds for every man woman and child in the UK.'
Which would have seemed like a lot of money a couple of weeks ago. But today we can just add it on to the 8000 pounds it may end up costing every man, woman and child to back the bank bailout plan:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3173868/Financial-crisis-Gordon-Browns-500-billion-gamble-fails-to-pay-off.html
Perhaps instead of spying on UK citizens, the government should have spent a few quid keeping a closer eye on the respectable financial institutions whose irresponsible behaviour has caused the sort of damage to the economy that terrorists can only dream about...
I think they're just being Ironic.
If they want to discuss this over dinner, I'd suggest investing in one of these:
http://www.moosejaw.com/moosejaw/shop/product_Sea-to-Summit-Titanium-Long-Spoon_10080841
'Sources close to the Chinese government were quick to stress that the timing of this announcement and the recent surprise appointment of US software developer Richard M Stallman as Governer of Sichuan Province are entirely coincidental'.
'"As the grid is ready but no data is expected to be produced by the LHC for the next few months, engineers have received permission to temporarily fill all 15 petabytes with adult material in an effort to test the infrastructure."'
The problem, of course, is what to do with all this 'material' when the collider eventually starts producing data. It's now well known that Tim Berners-Lee hurriedly developed the Web within months of the LEP going on line in 1989, which was causing an equally serious storage problem by the standards of the time. In a desperate attempt to free up space on the servers, he succeeded in creating a distributed global system capable of storing CERN's vast collection of Ginger Lynn GIFs, Adult VHS screen captures, and dubious ASCII art.
You had me going there for a moment, but I just checked the webcams and everything seems fine:
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html
'How, exactly, does a global pandemic affect a network?'
Basically, it comes down to all the 'viral' licenses that govern much of the software the internet runs on. To put it simply, the net behaves in much the same way as a series of tubes, which eventually become clogged up as the licenses proliferate. Luckily, Al Gore designed the Internet to survive even a nuclear war, so even a viral pandemic (interpreted by the net as censorship) can be routed around.
'Why would they need network management tools in case of such an event?'
This is of course the correct and universal response of ISPs to all eventualities. Too many people taking up that loss leader monthly deal? - Network Management. Customers actually using the bandwidth they've paid for? - Network Management. Rampant piracy detected by your friends at the RIAA? - Network Management. Catastrophic civilization-threatening hyperplague? - Network Management.
'Ok, but apart from Tropic Thunder, Collateral and The Last Samurai, what has Tom Cruise done for us?'
I thought we were talking about Palin, not Cleese.
'He just showed them why it is not such a good idea to put a religious person at the head of a science organisation.'
What, you mean like Francis Collins?:
http://www.genome.gov/10001018
Dawkins isn't a big fan of his views either:
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1555132,00.html
but apparently that whole 'human genome project' thing turned out to be quite successful...
'I'm sure it'll be super duper fast with a 1500$ case and 2 raptor drives in a raid 0 config.'
Yes, but does it come with the 'little Cray monitor' from Neuromancer? Never mind flying cars, I want my cyberpunk-style consumer electronics casually branded with cutting-edge 80s tech company names now!
**even later**
Consumer: "Well, Sony weren't very helpful, but the great thing about PlayAnywhere is I'm not limited to a single supplier! Let's see who else supports these files...Great! Microsoft is a fully paid up member! Now, where's that new Zune I won in the McCain For America raffle..? OK, *Squirting files to device*...'Incompatible format!' WTF?"
Consumer: "Hey Microsoft! It says right here you fully support the PlayAnywhere Ecosystem! Why won't my files work?"
Microsoft: "Oh come on kid. Don't you get it?"
Comsumer: "?"
Microsoft: "Look, every couple of years they come out with one of these schemes, and we always sign up to it just to fuck with Apple. But we obviously wouldn't be caught dead using it ourselves! Tell you what, how about we give you a free upgrade from Vista to Mojave to thank you for your feedback?"
'I agree. Creationism and other pseudoscience should be discussed in science classes. I doubt that's quite what the good reverend had in mind though.'
Actually, I think it's pretty much exactly what he had in mind. His original piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/11/michael.reiss.creationism
isn't the usual lame and intellectually dishonest call to 'teach the controversy', agrees that [intelligent design theories] 'are not the products of scientific reasoning', and mentions that [questions about creationism and intelligent design] 'can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works'. Although he has (and respects other) religious beliefs, he makes it very clear that evolution is 'the central concept in biological sciences, providing a conceptual framework that unifies every aspect of the life sciences into a single coherent discipline'. The question is, how does a science teacher get this concept across to students who think their religious beliefs conflict with the curriculum?
'So far, the list includes several big-name brands in computers, networking and consumer electronics, but there are some glaring absences, including Apple'
FAIL!
If the lipstick isn't even compatible with your favourite breed of pig, their silly little 'coalition' is just as doomed as all the others before it.
'but what if tomorrow Steve releases a press release apologizing to Vista users but blames it squarely on Vista "oh sorry something in our new version invoked a buggy piece of vista and we had to work around it."'
No, that's not why they did it. It crashes so that anyone who just bought the largest capacity iPod won't find out it's 40Gb smaller than the previous model. (Except Mac uses, of course, but they'll just get all excited about how much thinner it is now, while stroking their MacBook Airs dreamily with the other hand. XP users haven't upgraded their Diamond Rios yet).
'At that point, one lowly scientist (possible of Asian origin) will still be working in his office - despite regular calls of 'Hu! It's all fine, come out here and have some champagne'. He shouts out 'In a minute, I'm just checking something' Then to himself 'This is wrong. This is all wrong. Planck's constant shouldn't be varying like that.''
Or on the eve of the big experiment, an engineer with a dubious euro accent has just finished talking to a colleague ('see you when you get back') and is making some final adjustments to the magnets or something ('we don't want any hitches tomorrow'), when suddenly...
Oh wait. You can download that one here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/bigbang/torchwood.shtml
I like Terry Pratchett's take on this sort of 'low risk' experiment (from 'The Science of Discworld'):
"Well ... in the unlikely event of it going seriously wrong, it ... wouldn't just blow up the university, sir."
"What would it blow up, pray?"
"Er ... everything, sir."
"Everything there is, you mean?"
"Within a radius of about fifty thousand miles out into space, sir, yes. According to Hex it'd happen instantaneously. We wouldn't even know about it."
"And the odds of this are...?"
"About fifty to one, sir."
The wizards relaxed.
"That's pretty safe. I wouldn't bet on a horse at those odds," said the Senior Wrangler.
'I'd love to see the results of removing Junk DNA from a human's genome, and then pump it into an egg and grow it up all normal like and see what kind of walking cancer emerges.'
Well, Nature has (sort of) done this experiment already. The Fugu (pufferfish) genome has a highly 'compressed' genome, with about the same number of genes as mammals, but a much smaller complement of non-coding DNA:
http://genomebiology.com/2002/3/9/comment/1012
So it's certainly possible for an 'advanced' species to survive without the 'burden' of much of this material (obviously the regulatory elements are still required, but a lot of the highly repetitive stuff seems to be dispensable). Of course the 'junk DNA' may still confer evolutionary advantages (as the linked article put it: 'it may in fact be the clay from which evolution fashions morphogenetic changes'), and perhaps it says something that mammals have in general evolved in what most of us would regard as a much more interesting way than pufferfish...
Well personally I'd much rather be unionized than ionized. And I'm shocked that nobody on Slashdot passes the Asimov test!
Just stick them on an Archival Gold CD, and in 25 years post this to Slashdot:
"I've been tasked with finding a way to read digitally stored photographs buried in a small underground time capsule 25 years ago. It looks like they used a steel vessel, welded closed..."
No, the IOC is going to keep quiet about this one. Given the recent revelations about CGI fireworks, fake sports fans, dubious pianos, and the substituted singer, they're desperately hoping we won't find out that this is the ACTUAL stadium...
'How do you sex a bike?'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1569272/Man-who-had-sex-with-bicycle-sentenced.html
Sheriff Colin Miller added: "In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a 'cycle-sexualist'. "
According to the BBC, Phelps's armoury of secret weapons includes ... Hot Grits! (no, really):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7562840.stm
Oh, and eggs. Lots of eggs. But don't try this at home:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/15/foodanddrink.michaelphelps