PNAS considers this important enough that it has the article tagged as "open access" -- free for all to read.
It's not what the PNAS editors think about it that made it Open Access. It's that the authors were enlightened enough to request that the article be Open Access, and willing to pay PNAS about $1000 to make it so. It is to the journal's credit that they offer authors the option, and that all articles are made Open Access after a few months.
Hibernate copies the RAM to hard disk along with the device state information. This is a lot slower, but lasts 'forever'
Another of Apple's little fits of genius was to make the laptop automagically write the RAM/states to disk - essentialy switch to a hibernated state - when battery power drops to a dangerous level. Waking then takes a few extra seconds, but is still much faster than a reboot - and of course the user state is precisely as you left it. So closing the lid on an iBook effectively lasts forever, because Apple was smart enough to make the distinction between Sleep and Hibernate transparent to the user.
Your computer forces you to wait, enter your password, and then wait again? Aside from preventing you from accomplishing something useful during the entire wait time, that's bad for security.
I've noticed that desktop workstations at VA medical centers have this behavior, too. Whenever you log in, the first thing it does is query the VA IT servers for, and if necessary install, updates to every piece of software on the desktop. The computers boot very quickly, but logging in can often take 10 minutes thanks to all of this "background" work which prevents the Desktop from even appearing. I don't know if simple querying really takes this long, or if probability ensures that there's always some component that needs updating, even if someone else had logged into that machine only 5 minutes before you did. I suspect this is the same behavior the GPP is describing at his company. PITA. But, interestingly, it makes the ancient thin clients that the VA is slowly phasing out seem downright desirable as work stations - they may be generally slow as molasses, but they lack all of this log in baggage.
The only guns are now owned and in the hands of the British Army and the regulated militias under the British. The colonials now are completely unarmed facing both the regulars of the British Army and the militias under the British.
Those "regulated militias under the British" were the folks who stood their ground at Lexington and Concord. The colonial resistance weren't a bunch of random farmers, but were the longstanding, government-supported state and local militias. In prior wars they had been called into British service, fighting as colonial units on the frontiers and in Canada. However, it seems as if there is no modern equivalent to these local militias, since the National Guard - while composed of part-time citizen-soldiers - is too closely tied to the federal government, and local law enforcement - while local - is all-professional and therefore detached from the People.
It depends on what, exactly, you are comparing. If you pick out a human gene and its chimp counterpart, and line up the sequenes, you find they are about 99.8% identical at the nucleotide level (and often 100% identical when you look at the encoded amino acids). These regions are presumably under selective pressure. If you do the same for corresponding non-gene sequences, ones which are not under selective pressure, you find they are 98.6% identical. However, now that the two genomes are essentially complete, we know that there are some large-scale duplication and deletion events, as well as variations in mobile elements, that make the overall identity between the two genomes somewhat less than the 98-99% identity between homolgous sequenes. So 95%, 98.6%, or 99.8% - all are correct answers in the correct context.
That's the way medical insurance is *designed* to work. It's a net loss as long as all we need is routine stuff (like wisdom tooth extractions). And we accept that in the understanding that in the case of a severe, traumatic injury--something we just wouldn't be able to pay for *at all* otherwise--we'll be covered.
It may work that way for young, healthy, childless people, but the wheels fall off when you think about everyone else. Everyone will require significant medical care during their life. If not due to injury, then most certainly due to age or for routine care of children. The very idea of "medical insurance" starts to sound like an oxymoron when you realize that virtually every human being is guaranteed to have some sort of chronic and treatable - and therefore expensive - medical condition when they get older (and "older" may well mean 40s, not 80s). "Insurance" here acts less like true insurance - where the odds of having to redeem a claim are very low - and more like an investment plan where the bank can choose to seize your investment at any moment and pawn your needs off on the government instead.
I doubt it. I bet there are more bankruptcies as a result of credit card overextension, or poorly managed home loans, than as a result of medical expenses.
A recent study that made some ripples in the media indeed found that half of all bankruptcies were due to medical bills. Most frighteningly, they found that 75% of families forced to declare bankrupcty for medical bills had health insurance.
If you want to own the result, then feel free to go start up your own lab and look for the venture capital to fund your research just like every other person who wants to strike out into business for themselves.
I guess you're not aware that this is the way most academic biomedical research works these days. All your funding - even your salary - typically comes from competitive grants that you must seek out, secure, and retain. All of the resources that the university supplies are paid for from your grants. Typically >50% of the grant is "taxed" to pay for that nice lab space, power, water, support, etc. "Tenure" these days often means simply that you won't be fired. It doesn't come with any guarantees of support or salary. If you lose your grants - well, the university will happily keep you on staff with no salary. Nice pension, good healthcare, sure - but also paid for out of those grants. It's a highly competitive, free-market field. Mostly meritocratic, but certainly not "cushy".
But all of that has no bearing on your original point, before the digression into scientist-baiting, which is that the "venture capitalist" - the taxpayers - should have ownership of the results equivalent to their stake. I agree completely. Aside from the moral argument, I can't imagine any real venture capitalist happily handing forking over all ownership rights like the government now does. It may be true that the system was less productive when the government retained all ownership, but there must be a better middle way.
I didn't want to go to the hospital unless I needed to, but since everything I read online was pointing to Appendicitis, I eventually decided that peace of mind was worth an out-of-pocket exam
The moral of this story is that Google helped you save your own life, by convincing you that you needed to be checked out. In a very short time I've seen several cases like yours in our county hospital, of uninsured young adults with appendicitis. But unlike you they put off seeing a doctor for days, even weeks, out of fear of the bill. Despite barely being able to stand from the pain, or vomiting for two weeks straight. By then the appendix has usually ruptured, causing life-threatening peritonitis. One came very, very close to dying - while if he had come in within a day of two of feeling the pain, it would have been as routine as your case.
The internet certainly did save your life. What this says about our system of health care delivery is another comment.
For things like crypto, clients are looking for the magic number in different ranges. Are the F@H clients looking at different protien chains, or the same single chain with different folding possibilities? Or something in between?
We don't have many shortcuts (yet) for figuring out what shape a 1-dimensional strand of peptides will take when correctly folded in 3-dimensional space. What we can do is positional all of the thousands of bonds in one particular configuration, then calculate the overall energy of the protein (how stable it is with its bonds in that particular configuration). These programs iterively work through millions of such configurations, looking for the most stable one. Most bonds have a limited range of motion, making the job a little more tractable. But still, it's impossible to search all possible configurations, so the art lies in creating an algorithm that can walk its way towards the "correct" configuration without getting sidetracked.
Our infant mortality is high because our pre-natal survivability is quite good. Many babies are "born" today who would have been still-births in other countries. When a doctor fails to keep them alive, we count that as an infant death; in other countries they either die before birth or are not counted as an infant death for statistical purposes. Under those circumstances, as medical technology advances this measure of infant mortality can rise. See also. In general, infant mortality statistics are not comparable between countries or across definition changes within the same country.
There is surely some truth to this, but I think a different interpretation is more popular among epidemiologists. That is, for infants with similar birthweights, the US has comparable infant mortality rates (not better, comparable) to other developed nations. However, the US has many more low-birth weight infants than other nations, amongst whom most of the mortality happens. Some of that may be US doctors being more aggressive about delivering very-sick very-premies. But most is probably due to gaping holes in preventative and prenatal care that create too many very-sick very-premies. As the only developed nation without some form of universal medical coverage, many more mothers-to-be in the US are in poor health to begin with, and do not receive proper prenatal care.
One of the sad ironies is that most states actually have statutory health coverage for pregnant women and infants. But many immigrant, underclass, and undersevered populations still aren't able take full advantage of it, for a variety of social and economic reasons.
Really? What about 9261983? Had the worst not been assumed then WWIII might well have occured.
I would think that "assuming the worst" would have meant Petrov assuming that there was an inbound attack, not that there was a computer error. If he had assumed the worst, most of us might be dead.
Examples: there is a high pitch whining noise that comes from the MacBook Pros. It is quite obviously an electrical leak, which consistently goes away if you switch off the second core. Apple has yet to *officially* acknowledge this problem. It's one thing to acknowledge, it's another thing to replace. They could easily say "yeah, sorry, that's not repairable", but it's quite insulting to go to an authorized dealer and say "there, don't you hear it? it's driving me insane" and get an answer "uhm, sorry, no, I don't hear it". Same for AppleCare.
I have a MBP that whines; a couple of thoughts:
1. The techs very well may *not* hear it. There's been a story going around the web about a high-pitched tone that only young people can hear, which (the story goes) is becoming popular as a classroom-safe ring tone among teens. I listened to it with some older folks last week, and indeed only the young people ( ~30) could hear it. And to me, it was almost exactly the same pitch as the MBP whine. So I think the maddingly inconsistent nature of the whine reports, from person to person, has a LOT to do with older people (or young people with permaturely damaged hearing) genuinely not being able to hear it.
2. You can easily silence the whine, short of disabling a core, by running a small program in the background to prevent the CPUs from entering their deepest sleep mode. Google for "QuietMBP". It runs at the lowest priority, so it never disrupts your tasks; it uses only about 8% of one core, and affects battery life proportionately - meaning you'll be hard-pressed to noticed the difference. It conviently sets itself to auto-launch at log-in. Although I realize it's an ugly workaround, it's such a satisfyingly effective workaround that I just can't get myself worked up about the whine issue anymore.
I don't have precise numbers, but my iBook used to run for 3-4 hours on a full battery charge, 4.5 if I was being really stingy with power. Sleeping overnight would use ~5% of the charge. I could leave it asleep all weekend and it would still have about 75% charge. From that perspective, Mac sleeping uses essentially no power. For the four years I owned it, I never once turned it off and left it off.
By contrast, friends with Windows laptops never sleep their machines overnight for fear of draining the battery. The few times they tried, their fears were confirmed. These laptops are XP machines, much newer than my old iBook. I'm not sure if they were using Hibernate or Suspend or both, but none semed to work as well as my iBook's Sleep. To be fair, my Intel Mac (MBP) uses significantly more charge when asleep than my G3 iBook did. A full charge lasts 2-3 hours of use, and an overnight sleep drains ~10%. Still, that's much better than XP does on Intel hardware. Just not quite as impressive as PPC Macs.
Maybe 20 years ago. Now, it's unusual for a bio PhD to finish grad school in less than 6 years, and extremely unusual to land an introductory faculty position without completing two substantial (2-3 years) post-docs. And many PhDs spent a couple of years after college working as techs or in industry before starting the program. Given all that, it's unusual to even begin work in a tenure-track position by 34.
i've been using mac's from '89 (on a lowly black-and-white powerbook) till now (with the iMac FP) and macos X is simply slow on iMac FP (which is running G4 800MHz). I've seen OSX running in G5 and core duo and it's good. but on anything slower than iMac FP (G4 800) i don't think it's reasonable speed. btw my imac fp is running os9...
Until last month my main development machine was a 600 MHz G3 iBook (grad school == poverty). Slow? Sure. Usable? Definitely. It's now in my gf's hands running 10.4 happily enough. Dashboard even still has all those cool rippley effects. When I first got the iBook, it had 10.2 and 128 MB of RAM: slow, sure; usable, definitely. And I know folks running 10.2/3 literally on 400 MHz iMacs. It works fine. I think it's just absurd to consider an 800 MHz G4 too underpowered to run OS X at all. Now, I wouldn't willingly go back to my iBook, but speed is very subjective - we tend to consider things "unusuable" once we're used to better, forgetting that we used them just fine for many years.
And OS X isn't the major problem with limited RAM - it's trying to run Word, Excel, iPhoto, Photoshop, etc., and trying to run them all simultaneously. Even then, OS X does a respectable job with enough free drive space for volumnous scratch. OS X, together with lighweight apps, could run "good enough" on a 400 MHZ G3 (or equivalent) with 128 MB RAM. After all, the white iBooks debuted at 500 MHz with 64 MB of RAM shortly after 10.0 shipped.
But a customized Linux install will run much, much better.
[Is OS9 *really* still your day-to-day environment on that iMac? Almost all of the staple apps are out of development, save good ol' iCab. I'm really curious how a little more "snappiness" in the Finder trumps the stability and app availability of OS X...]
Excel is just as bad, and at a similar threshold. When I'm forced to open a multi-100,000-cell data file in Excel, the first thing I do is turn off autosave.
1) You can't run OSX on a 400 MHz AMD processor with 128 Meg of RAM. (If you know how, please let me know!)
Well, given that OS X now famously runs on Intel, and that plenty of Mac users still happily run various versions of OS X on 400 MHz G3's with 128 MB of RAM, it's surely possible. If Jobs offered, he must have been ready to put his OS where his mouth was.
But I agree with the good folks at MIT that the OS must be open-source, to allow complete transparency and tinkerability and to prevent any one vendor from being able to dictate terms to the project later on.
If you read biology journals, you'll see that just about every third or fourth paper consists of "we pureed some sea sponge in a blender and extracted this compound. And look, it kills cancer cells (*cough* and non-cancerous cells too *cough*)!"
Once in a blue moon, it does work. Search PubMed for "ecteinascidin" or "Et-743". The compound was isolated from pureed Caribbean sea squirt, and is showing great promise for hard-to-treat sarcomas.
On the other hand, that's the only example that comes easily to mind.
This statement is categorically untrue. Tamiflu is made from an element of Chinese star anise. Are you surprised by the fact that 90% of the Chinese star anise in the world is used to make Tamiflu? Imagine if Chinese star anise is rarer than it is.
The same Wikipedia article says that a complete synthesis protocol was developed this year. Like for Taxol, it took a while but proved possible. And happened much faster than Taxol, probably showing the effect of improving organic chemistry science and tools.
I find it surprising, though, that both syntheses came out of academic labs - not from the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs. You'd think they'd have enormous incentive, and more than enough resources, to do such work themselves. If they aren't interested in actually making drugs, what exactly is it that they do?
You've got to isolate the gene(s) responsible for the protein production, successfully insert them into bacteria or yeast to produce a viable colony, and then ferment them. By no means automatic. It's not a simple matter of 'cloning' a protein.
You just described the simple matter of "cloning", as it's used in the laboratory sense. It is, in fact, quite simple.
Apple owns the copyright to the kernel and it is licensed under the Apple Public source License. Since you do not own the copyright, you do not have the right to relicense it under the GPL.
Even RMS considers the APSL 2.0 to be a Free software license, although it's not compatible with the GPL. Anyone, therefore, can fork it off, certainly so long as they continue releasing it under the same license. Apple would get your contributions, but so would everyone else in the world. It would work just like any of the *BSDs - Berkeley still owns the copyright to its code, but the forkers own the copyright to theirs, and the whole mix can be released under the common license by the forkers. Or under any other license compatible with the original - thus how Apple releases modified BSD components under the APSL.
What would give you the impression that you should have the right to fork something you do not own and did not contribute anything to?
That is the whole point of Free software. Everyone has that right.
Well I'll be. There are indeed two little hooks which are pulled out right before it shuts. I guess that's why it feels so nice. Mechanical with a magnetic assist.
I never looked that closely at my lid before. And now I'm wondering if my old iBook has these hooks, too.
If you pick a selection of 10 spots that each have four (yes, I originally said four because of the nucleotides...but that was also a WAG at the number of alleles any particular "gene" was likely to have) variations, you get 1 in 10^4, which is 10 thousand
Swap the base and exponent. If I flip a coin once, the number of possible outcomes is 2^1, not 1^2. If you look at ten loci with four alleles each, the number of (theoretically) possible combinations is 4^10 (>1,000,000), not 10^4. If each loci has more than four alleles (and variable repeats have many possible lengths) the higher base causes the value of the equation to go up *very* fast.
As for technique, what's typically done *is* to PCR across sites with variable-length repeats and run the results on a gel to visualize the length. Yes, polymerases sometimes have problems "slipping" on repeats - this is why the repeats are variable to begin with. But the freqency of slippage is very, very low, which is why measuring the repeats lengths from a cheek swab can confirm identitiy and paternity. They are identical is almost all of our cells, and are passed on almost identically to our kids. The laboratory reactions use specialized enzymes that are even more reliable.
Transcription, exons, silent changes, etc. are important if you're looking at proteins or protein levels, usually in the context of diagnosing genetic disease. Here, we're simply examining genomic sequence - they don't apply.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on what, exactly, you are comparing. If you pick out a human gene and its chimp counterpart, and line up the sequenes, you find they are about 99.8% identical at the nucleotide level (and often 100% identical when you look at the encoded amino acids). These regions are presumably under selective pressure. If you do the same for corresponding non-gene sequences, ones which are not under selective pressure, you find they are 98.6% identical. However, now that the two genomes are essentially complete, we know that there are some large-scale duplication and deletion events, as well as variations in mobile elements, that make the overall identity between the two genomes somewhat less than the 98-99% identity between homolgous sequenes. So 95%, 98.6%, or 99.8% - all are correct answers in the correct context.
(IIABioinformaticist)
But all of that has no bearing on your original point, before the digression into scientist-baiting, which is that the "venture capitalist" - the taxpayers - should have ownership of the results equivalent to their stake. I agree completely. Aside from the moral argument, I can't imagine any real venture capitalist happily handing forking over all ownership rights like the government now does. It may be true that the system was less productive when the government retained all ownership, but there must be a better middle way.
The internet certainly did save your life. What this says about our system of health care delivery is another comment.
One of the sad ironies is that most states actually have statutory health coverage for pregnant women and infants. But many immigrant, underclass, and undersevered populations still aren't able take full advantage of it, for a variety of social and economic reasons.
1. The techs very well may *not* hear it. There's been a story going around the web about a high-pitched tone that only young people can hear, which (the story goes) is becoming popular as a classroom-safe ring tone among teens. I listened to it with some older folks last week, and indeed only the young people ( ~30) could hear it. And to me, it was almost exactly the same pitch as the MBP whine. So I think the maddingly inconsistent nature of the whine reports, from person to person, has a LOT to do with older people (or young people with permaturely damaged hearing) genuinely not being able to hear it.
2. You can easily silence the whine, short of disabling a core, by running a small program in the background to prevent the CPUs from entering their deepest sleep mode. Google for "QuietMBP". It runs at the lowest priority, so it never disrupts your tasks; it uses only about 8% of one core, and affects battery life proportionately - meaning you'll be hard-pressed to noticed the difference. It conviently sets itself to auto-launch at log-in. Although I realize it's an ugly workaround, it's such a satisfyingly effective workaround that I just can't get myself worked up about the whine issue anymore.
I don't have precise numbers, but my iBook used to run for 3-4 hours on a full battery charge, 4.5 if I was being really stingy with power. Sleeping overnight would use ~5% of the charge. I could leave it asleep all weekend and it would still have about 75% charge. From that perspective, Mac sleeping uses essentially no power. For the four years I owned it, I never once turned it off and left it off.
By contrast, friends with Windows laptops never sleep their machines overnight for fear of draining the battery. The few times they tried, their fears were confirmed. These laptops are XP machines, much newer than my old iBook. I'm not sure if they were using Hibernate or Suspend or both, but none semed to work as well as my iBook's Sleep. To be fair, my Intel Mac (MBP) uses significantly more charge when asleep than my G3 iBook did. A full charge lasts 2-3 hours of use, and an overnight sleep drains ~10%. Still, that's much better than XP does on Intel hardware. Just not quite as impressive as PPC Macs.
And OS X isn't the major problem with limited RAM - it's trying to run Word, Excel, iPhoto, Photoshop, etc., and trying to run them all simultaneously. Even then, OS X does a respectable job with enough free drive space for volumnous scratch. OS X, together with lighweight apps, could run "good enough" on a 400 MHZ G3 (or equivalent) with 128 MB RAM. After all, the white iBooks debuted at 500 MHz with 64 MB of RAM shortly after 10.0 shipped.
But a customized Linux install will run much, much better.
[Is OS9 *really* still your day-to-day environment on that iMac? Almost all of the staple apps are out of development, save good ol' iCab. I'm really curious how a little more "snappiness" in the Finder trumps the stability and app availability of OS X...]
Excel is just as bad, and at a similar threshold. When I'm forced to open a multi-100,000-cell data file in Excel, the first thing I do is turn off autosave.
The second thing I do is export to plain-text.
But I agree with the good folks at MIT that the OS must be open-source, to allow complete transparency and tinkerability and to prevent any one vendor from being able to dictate terms to the project later on.
On the other hand, that's the only example that comes easily to mind.
I find it surprising, though, that both syntheses came out of academic labs - not from the pharmaceutical companies that sell the drugs. You'd think they'd have enormous incentive, and more than enough resources, to do such work themselves. If they aren't interested in actually making drugs, what exactly is it that they do?
- A friendly neighborhood molecular biologist
Well I'll be. There are indeed two little hooks which are pulled out right before it shuts. I guess that's why it feels so nice. Mechanical with a magnetic assist.
I never looked that closely at my lid before. And now I'm wondering if my old iBook has these hooks, too.
As for technique, what's typically done *is* to PCR across sites with variable-length repeats and run the results on a gel to visualize the length. Yes, polymerases sometimes have problems "slipping" on repeats - this is why the repeats are variable to begin with. But the freqency of slippage is very, very low, which is why measuring the repeats lengths from a cheek swab can confirm identitiy and paternity. They are identical is almost all of our cells, and are passed on almost identically to our kids. The laboratory reactions use specialized enzymes that are even more reliable.
Transcription, exons, silent changes, etc. are important if you're looking at proteins or protein levels, usually in the context of diagnosing genetic disease. Here, we're simply examining genomic sequence - they don't apply.
(IAAB)