While the basic biology seems sound, this result is from only one patient while one of the authors holds stock in the company that manufactures the drug and has applied for several patents for its use in treating Alzheimer's.
Pardon me while I await the large sample, randomized controlled double-blind study by authors with no competing interests to confirm these findings.
The abstract of the research paper says that this 'new' bacteria, Carnobacterium pleistocenium, has a 99.8% similarity to Carnobacterium alterfunditum, as determined by gene sequence. I don't have access to this journal, so perhaps someone can fill in the details (how do these frozen bacteria differ from their modern day relatives and/or descendants?).
Phylochronology is a new field that proposes studying molecular evolution on both spatial and temporal scales, using the tools of aDNA and paleontology. Here, however, we have living samples with which to make a comparison. Thus, there's the potential to compare not just nucleotide sequence, but differences in morphology, development, and evolvability.
What struck me first about the schematic was the sexual reproduction or lateral gene transfer between languages in the '70s and '80s compared with the speciation into distinct languages by the late 1990s. In the past, it seems, ideas were often combined into new languages (Scheme = Lisp + Algol), while now they've stratified into identifiable species (Python, Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, etc, where a recent exception would be C#).
However, further inspection shows that the timeline is distorted, making recent changes look more significant. Unlike more complete evolutionary records, this phylogeney shows languages that are important enough to remember (read: ancestors of currently used languages). A more complete tree would probably show that new languages are still being created that are amalgamations of ideas implemented in current languages. Some of these new languages we'll all be using in 15 years, but right now no one would think to include them in such a diagram.
A more interesting study would track language features, and show features transferring into languages, e.g., the addition of OO to Perl.
One of my professors was wearing his "Over 200 scientists named Steve support evolution" on Tuesday. He said the campaign is in response to advertisements saying "50 Scientists do not believe in evolution", to which the appropriate response is: How many of them are named Steve?, which is now a fair metric for comparison.
BTW, the campaign is named after Stephen J. Gould, RIP. (the same Stephen J. Gould that creationists/intelligent designoids think supports their positions, just because he believes his theories contradict the "accepted" understanding of evolution? What, are scientists supposed to agree about everything?)
When I started designing Perl, I explicitly set out to deconstruct all the computer languages I knew and recombine or reconstruct them in a different way...
Wall does not use the word deconstruct correctly. To deconstruct does not mean to take apart, as Wall's usage suggests. Rather, deconstruction is about finding the assumed hierarchy of an opposition and showing that the component that seems to be higher/superior can't be defined without reference to the lower/inferior component.
Of course, you could always say that Wall has simply recontextualized deconstruction, but then you'd be one of those intellectually feeble postmodernists.
Actually, it is the icon for the 4.1 beta versions of OmniWeb. I was kind of disappointed when they changed it to the current blue/green globe, rather than the more Aqua looking globe seen in the screenshot. But both are vast improvements over the pre-4.1 icon.
I've always heard that evolution through natural selection *really* kicks in when you have 90%-type mortalities. Do we know for sure that the death rate from AIDS is 100%?
The mortality rate for AIDS (90% vs. 100%) is not issue. For natural selection to be a strong force, it matters how many people in the population are effected by AIDS compared to the frequency of a gene for immunity. If only 5% of the population is immune to AIDS, but <5% of the population has HIV, natural selection won't be strong enough to favor the gene for immunity.
It is "Mac OS X, version 10.1.4," and "Mac OS, version 9.2.2." "Mac OS" and "Mac OS X" are OS names. "10.1.4" and "9.2.2" are version numbers. Got it?
I suppose Apple called it version 10.0 for consistency with the rest of the Mac OS version scheme. They could/should have called it "Mac OS X 2.0" (but for anyone who has used OS X 1.2, perhaps a 9.8 jump in version number is actually kinda appropriate).
Heck, the OS used to simply be called "System", as in System 6, System 7. It's only been called MacOS since, what, 7.5.5?
CliqueNet is a peer-to-peer anonymous communication protocal based on Dining-cryptographers networks (CliqueNet makes the DC-net technique practical).
From the CliqueNet FAQ:
How do DC nets work ?
CliqueNet is based on Dining-Cryptographer networks, or DC-nets, originally suggested by Chaum in [C88]. DC-nets propagate a bit of information in the following way: suppose we have two participants, Alice and Bob, one of whom (e.g. Bob) would like to communicate a one-bit message to Charlie, but Alice and Bob want to hide the identity of the message originator. They first toss a coin in secret. Alice sends the truthful result of the coin flip to Charlie. Bob, on the other hand, reports the true result of the coin toss only if he wants to transmit a 0. If he wants to transmit a 1, Bob lies about the coin flip. Charlie deciphers the message by XOR?ing the values sent by Alice and Bob. If they both call out heads or tails, they are both telling the truth and the one-bit message is a zero; otherwise, one of them is lying, and the one-bit message is a one. Since Charlie does not know if it was Alice or Bob who lied about the coin toss, he can never determine who sent the message. This security guarantee is strong and information-theoretic: no amount of computational power can help Charlie determine that it was Bob who sent the message.
Basically, DC-nets guarantee anonymity no matter how much information you have about the network.
This is a "ground breaking" experiment? Hello? Stefano Nolfi and Dario Floreano have already done essentially the same thing with a couple of Khepera robots. The only real substantial difference that I see is that this experiment is on display for the public.
References:
Floreano D. and Mondada F. (1996) Evolution of homing navigation in a real mobile robot. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics---Part B: Cybernetics, 26(3):396--407
Nolfi S. and Floreano D. (1999) Co-evolving predator and prey robots: Do "arms races" arise in artificial evolution?, Artificial Life 4 (4):331--335
Origin of Species was an abstract, rushed into publication after Wallace sent Darwin his paper on speciation. Darwin never meant Origin to be a complete referenced work, which is why the study was used as evidence but never cited.
Darwin had been working on Natural Selection for a number of years before he stopped writing it in order to write his "abstract". I'm surprised no one had noticed this study before. Surely people have read Natural Selection (I'm not one of them).
Today I got a review copy of an Oval (raise your hands if you've heard about them... right, didn't think so) disk in the mail. Guess what? I couldn't review... because it was copy protected and couldn't be played on a cd-rom drive
An Oval CD doesn't play on your CD-player? Are you surprised? Oval's CD's always make my player sound broken!
But seriously, an unplayable CD isn't such a great conceptual leap from what Oval is saying about "music".
Slashdot Mirror
While the basic biology seems sound, this result is from only one patient while one of the authors holds stock in the company that manufactures the drug and has applied for several patents for its use in treating Alzheimer's.
Pardon me while I await the large sample, randomized controlled double-blind study by authors with no competing interests to confirm these findings.
The abstract of the research paper says that this 'new' bacteria, Carnobacterium pleistocenium, has a 99.8% similarity to Carnobacterium alterfunditum, as determined by gene sequence. I don't have access to this journal, so perhaps someone can fill in the details (how do these frozen bacteria differ from their modern day relatives and/or descendants?).
Phylochronology is a new field that proposes studying molecular evolution on both spatial and temporal scales, using the tools of aDNA and paleontology. Here, however, we have living samples with which to make a comparison. Thus, there's the potential to compare not just nucleotide sequence, but differences in morphology, development, and evolvability.
What struck me first about the schematic was the sexual reproduction or lateral gene transfer between languages in the '70s and '80s compared with the speciation into distinct languages by the late 1990s. In the past, it seems, ideas were often combined into new languages (Scheme = Lisp + Algol), while now they've stratified into identifiable species (Python, Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, etc, where a recent exception would be C#).
However, further inspection shows that the timeline is distorted, making recent changes look more significant. Unlike more complete evolutionary records, this phylogeney shows languages that are important enough to remember (read: ancestors of currently used languages). A more complete tree would probably show that new languages are still being created that are amalgamations of ideas implemented in current languages. Some of these new languages we'll all be using in 15 years, but right now no one would think to include them in such a diagram.
A more interesting study would track language features, and show features transferring into languages, e.g., the addition of OO to Perl.
One of my professors was wearing his "Over 200 scientists named Steve support evolution" on Tuesday. He said the campaign is in response to advertisements saying "50 Scientists do not believe in evolution", to which the appropriate response is: How many of them are named Steve?, which is now a fair metric for comparison.
BTW, the campaign is named after Stephen J. Gould, RIP. (the same Stephen J. Gould that creationists/intelligent designoids think supports their positions, just because he believes his theories contradict the "accepted" understanding of evolution? What, are scientists supposed to agree about everything?)
Larry Wall writes:
When I started designing Perl, I explicitly set out to deconstruct all the computer languages I knew and recombine or reconstruct them in a different way...
Wall does not use the word deconstruct correctly. To deconstruct does not mean to take apart, as Wall's usage suggests. Rather, deconstruction is about finding the assumed hierarchy of an opposition and showing that the component that seems to be higher/superior can't be defined without reference to the lower/inferior component.
Of course, you could always say that Wall has simply recontextualized deconstruction, but then you'd be one of those intellectually feeble postmodernists.
Actually, it is the icon for the 4.1 beta versions of OmniWeb. I was kind of disappointed when they changed it to the current blue/green globe, rather than the more Aqua looking globe seen in the screenshot. But both are vast improvements over the pre-4.1 icon.
Only Mac users would argue about icons. ;-)
I've always heard that evolution through natural selection *really* kicks in when you have 90%-type mortalities. Do we know for sure that the death rate from AIDS is 100%?
The mortality rate for AIDS (90% vs. 100%) is not issue. For natural selection to be a strong force, it matters how many people in the population are effected by AIDS compared to the frequency of a gene for immunity. If only 5% of the population is immune to AIDS, but <5% of the population has HIV, natural selection won't be strong enough to favor the gene for immunity.
It is "Mac OS X, version 10.1.4," and "Mac OS, version 9.2.2." "Mac OS" and "Mac OS X" are OS names. "10.1.4" and "9.2.2" are version numbers. Got it?
I suppose Apple called it version 10.0 for consistency with the rest of the Mac OS version scheme. They could/should have called it "Mac OS X 2.0" (but for anyone who has used OS X 1.2, perhaps a 9.8 jump in version number is actually kinda appropriate).
Heck, the OS used to simply be called "System", as in System 6, System 7. It's only been called MacOS since, what, 7.5.5?
From the CliqueNet FAQ:
How do DC nets work ?
CliqueNet is based on Dining-Cryptographer networks, or DC-nets, originally suggested by Chaum in [C88]. DC-nets propagate a bit of information in the following way: suppose we have two participants, Alice and Bob, one of whom (e.g. Bob) would like to communicate a one-bit message to Charlie, but Alice and Bob want to hide the identity of the message originator. They first toss a coin in secret. Alice sends the truthful result of the coin flip to Charlie. Bob, on the other hand, reports the true result of the coin toss only if he wants to transmit a 0. If he wants to transmit a 1, Bob lies about the coin flip. Charlie deciphers the message by XOR?ing the values sent by Alice and Bob. If they both call out heads or tails, they are both telling the truth and the one-bit message is a zero; otherwise, one of them is lying, and the one-bit message is a one. Since Charlie does not know if it was Alice or Bob who lied about the coin toss, he can never determine who sent the message. This security guarantee is strong and information-theoretic: no amount of computational power can help Charlie determine that it was Bob who sent the message.
Basically, DC-nets guarantee anonymity no matter how much information you have about the network.
This is a "ground breaking" experiment? Hello? Stefano Nolfi and Dario Floreano have already done essentially the same thing with a couple of Khepera robots. The only real substantial difference that I see is that this experiment is on display for the public.
References:
Floreano D. and Mondada F. (1996) Evolution of homing navigation in a real mobile robot. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics---Part B: Cybernetics, 26(3):396--407
Nolfi S. and Floreano D. (1999) Co-evolving predator and prey robots: Do "arms races" arise in artificial evolution?, Artificial Life 4 (4):331--335
Darwin had been working on Natural Selection for a number of years before he stopped writing it in order to write his "abstract". I'm surprised no one had noticed this study before. Surely people have read Natural Selection (I'm not one of them).
An Oval CD doesn't play on your CD-player? Are you surprised? Oval's CD's always make my player sound broken!
But seriously, an unplayable CD isn't such a great conceptual leap from what Oval is saying about "music".