What do you know? A more drastic and invasive procedure has a greater effect. Except, splints cost $6, and surgery costs thousands and leaves you without the use of your hands for weeks.
A drastic procedure does not necessarily mean greater (as in better) effect. For instance, it is has been shown in recent years that surgery for severe ulcer does not have an effect, contrary to what has benn believed for a long time. If people have been "cured" by such procedures, it has been a pure placebo effect!
In fact, without reading the article (hey this is/.!), I am thinking that the very fact that people have to rest their wrists after surgery could have something to do with the better results!
I think GSM phones never really took of in the US because there were many successful alternatives, as Pagers and Analog cellphones. Neither did really have success in europe.
The pager presence is a good point; Analog mobiles is not. Sweden and Finland, two of the most GSM dense countries since the start of GSM, both had a very successful analog mobile net called NMT. In fact it is still in use in the northern parts simply because of it better range.
I am not sure why GSM so quickly replaced NMT, but I think the GSM phones were smaller right away.
I'd also question the ability of user interface design to succeed - not only are the graphics awkward in products like this, but they seldom have the "slick interface" present in commercial games.
I am by no means a gamer. In fact, I rarely play computer games. But whenever I have actually sat down in front of a game, I have been utterly confused as to what I am actually seeing on the screen and how to make things happen. I have yet to see a "slick" user interface!
I mean, standard widgets does not seem to be used, and the designers seem to prefer using unreadable fonts in order to get as much info onto screen and/or look good/cool/ethnic/timely. Also, I have not been impressed by the use of colors to help users discern what is going on.
Am I the only one to feel this way? Or am I simply too uninformed to state my opinion? I'll admit that I have not tried a game in a couple of years, but I do look at pretty pictures on the web and in magazines once in a while.
What I am actually trying to say is that this is an area where open source could actually make an impact. While writing a game engine is hard and designing graphics is cumbersome and requires artistic skills, hashing around different fonts, widget placements, quick keys, and views could well be possible without too much expertise.
I think it is healthy to demand proper evidence for all scientific claims! And I am quite certain the the authors, Tavare in particular given your own quote, are well aware of this and do not see their conclusions as written in stone. Also, it is interesting to notice that the authors are probably from what you call the "old guard". I know Tavare is, and his co-authors being spread all over the world in distinguished departments suggests the same for them.
As to their method, please see my other post. It is certainly public, and it will be scrutinized by other researchers for sure. You can visit your closest research library and look it up in Nature.
In short, they do not use DNA for their analysis, only the fossil record.
I have browsed the Nature paper by Tavare et al that is the basis for the National Geographic piece, and have a good idea about what they are actually doing.
Contrary to what people here at/. are expecting, the authors do not use molecular data in their method (although they have compared their findings with studies using DNA). Instead, they have used a model for how species appears and goes extinct, modelled how the fossil record has been sampled, and then compared with known fossil data.
The speciation/extinction model says that species go extinct and split up in subspecies at certain rates. The fossil findings model is simply that the number of found fossils from a certain period of time is binomially distributed.
Data summarizing the number of primate fossils from different time periods was collected, and a starting point for the primate lineage that best explained the fossil record was computed.
In essence, if the starting point is too early, the method disqualifies it because we have not seen enough fossils, and if it is too late, it is disqualified because we have seen too many.
I could add that Simon Tavare is a well-respected statistician with solid experience in, for example, population genetics. (I don't recognize the other author names.) It would have been nice to see comments from other researchers about their assumptions, but I did not see anything on the Nature site and have not had the time to research this more closely.
It's funny to think that the basic page description language used under Unix is Postscript, which is much more closed than PDF.
I'll admit that I am no expert on PS, and know even less about PDF, but in what respect is PS "more closed" that PDF?! The whole language is publicly published and easily accessible for free to anyone near by a library. There are also countless implementations of PS interpreters.
I thought this was they way to go and was very excited to find fvwm2 (as DunbarTheInept above) support this feature. However, using it was quite a different issue. I found myself throwing the mouse left and right to get the screen to center where I wanted it. I was so used to rely on the display borders to act as mouse stoppers, that whenever I moved focus to another window, I would also scroll the desktop simply because I always hit the screen edges with the mouse.
This style of desktop also had, for me, the unfortunate side effect of distributing the windows over a too large estate. This meant that when I suddenly wanted to windows close to each other, it was always hard to setup because they were far away from each other on the virtual desktop.
Devices that do everything are usually pushed aside in favour of an individual device that does something.
Unless you were writing this from a WebTV pad, your claim carries no weight with me!
Just some light-weight trolling...
Re:This is good news...
on
J#
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The ability to write in your favorite language C#, C++, VB, JScript, etc and now Java is a huge improvement over locking a project into one language only and missing out on all the other shared libraries because your project is in Java or Objective-C or Python etc.
I'll admit that I have never done any large scale programming, but this statement about language lock-in seems entirely false to me. I have done programming for research purposes and combined C with C++, C with Scheme, and used tools mostly written in C call Fortran libraries. I have seen and used examples of Perl and Python programs accessing common C libraries.
For the computer science field, ResearchIndex does some of what you want. A problem as I see it is that you don't submit papers. The one option you have is to submit a URL to a web page or ftp directory where there are some papers in PDF or PS. Another issue is that this site is more or less tracking what is available in paper form (mostly conference contributions) or tech reports.
But users of ResearchIndex then have the option of rating papers on a scale 1 to 5, and if memory serves me, also comment on the paper.
Anyone knows what they are actually patenting here? I cannot understand what it could be. OK, I don't know the SVG standard, but how to describe vector graphics on a 2D surface has been well understood for a very long time know, hasn't it? And to simply agree on a standard for putting these technologies into an XML format should not require any fancy patentable stuff, one would think?
Since the article mentions there is already a vaccine for this, why is there talk that this could be used to create a vaccine? Why would we need another?
The press release from the Sanger Center actually says that they have a vaccine undergoing trials and that the sequencing efforts from this project helped the research for the vaccine. You don't need a full genome to do sequence analysis. Indeed, if you have some idea for what you are looking for, you can find fairly efficiently.
The scientists were saying they knew that the bacteria modified itself and they even knew that it did it 1500 years ago. How do they know that? Would anyone with some knowledge of this care to speculate?
Here is a speculation, because I have not read the actual Nature paper: They recognize some genomic material in the bacteria coming from some other bacteria. By analysing the amount of mutations in the incorporated material, they can get an estimate of how long ago it was incorporated.
Speculation 2: They computed evolutionary tree for different strains of plague bacteria and its relatives based on some genomic region with nice properties. This tree could give you estimates for when the strains started to deviate. Then, by studying for what bacteria the new modified material is common, you can decide the earliest point of inclusion.
This can be seen as blatant karma-whoring, but I would really appreciate if submitters of science stories dug out links like these before posting. Gives much better credibility, IMHO.
I actually cannot tell if you are joking or not, but the genome is made publicly available. In fact, that is usually required for the work to be published. Furthermore, the Wellcome trust which is funding this work supports "open source science".
From their press-release: "Details of the sequencing are posted on the internet so the information is freely available to researchers around the world."
Take a look at the way the Europeans have addressed their wireless devices and you will see they are light years ahead of the US. Probably because they don't spin their wheels and waste their time with bad ideas like WAP.
I actually thought European companies brought forth WAP, but i could be wrong on that one. However, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemes, and other big European players are still coming out with WAP phones and touting the technology, although perhaps not with the same magnitude of hype as two years ago.
There are also people out investing time and resources in producing WAP services. Take a look at BioWAP for instance! (I have heard that it is pretty easy to set up a WAP service though.)
What you claim is a main problem is nothing less than the regular course of tech business in general, and has certainly been done before in the telecom business. One can argue that GSM was created that way (although apparently there also were practical needs behind the standard), and certainly SMS was created before there was demand!
If nothing else, it's been a long-standing precident with Lego that other companies are allowed to use the same dimensions for building blocks, which allows Lego blocks to be used along-side other brands in the same creation.
I don't think this is true, although I don't know for sure. Lego are very careful with registering design patents, making sure that other cannot sell similar toys. I remember seeing a news item as a boy that the most fundamental Lego patent had expired, so other companies could start selling compatible building blocks. "Great, cheap lego!" was my thought. However, that cheap Lego also turned out to be crappy and ugly, so I didn't go for it.
Neither you nor I now what kind of treatments or drugs can come out of this, so none of us can claim anything about their forthcoming properties. In particular, we do not know what to expect about blood products that we can hope comes out of this research.
There are big differences with drugs for fighting AIDS. The treatments based on those drugs go on indefinately, so the cost is substantial also for an industrialised country. One single blood transfusion can make a big difference for a person, and could hopefully be affordable by a western world charity.
There is also not much of competition in the AIDS treatment business. As others have pointed out here, blood donations work pretty well already today, so if/when blood productions become industrialised, it must be made so efficiantly that the cost beats the blood donation system. This means price pressure in a way that we do not find on AIDS drugs.
Even if a third world country can not afford the drugs or the necessary infrastructure for same drugs, they can still benefit from charities and UN programs. I may have nice dreams on this topic, but they are not unrealistic. You have dreams too, but they are just nightmares. Progress is not benefitting from such pessimism.
At least the introduction and some of the discussion is readable for a layman like me. People with paranoid ideas about non-ethical and safety-blind researchers would benefit reading some if this. To quote:
"The clinical promise of human ES cell-based therapies is great; however, because these therapies will be entirely novel, serious concerns about safety and efficacy will need to be addressed before human clinical trials can be initiated. The malignant transformation of cells that have been cultured for extended periods is a particular concern.
"
Oh come on. If blood production could be industrialised, perhaps to the extent that very little stem cells as starting material is needed, and thus be available for cheap, that wouldn't anything for third world countries?
Charity organisation doing medical work in third world countries are able to buy basic drugs. Imagine the Red Cross being able to buy cheap blood in bulk and bring it in to disaster areas. They are certainly able to use anti-biotics large quantities. Why would cheap blood be any different?
You are truly underestimating the effect of industrialisation.
I think it is the industrialisation possibilities that fosters the excitement. The cost of a pint of blood is certainly more than a glass of jouice. Consider the work being done collecting the blood and testing it. A lot of manual interaction goes on here. Also, there seems to be a consistent shortage of blood.
If scientists could get stem cells to grow faster and under a more controlled fashion, it could allow for a large scale industrial fabrication of blood. It would put an end to shortages and also probably lower costs. Instead of screening your pint of blood for HIV, typhus or whatever, a large batch could be checked for quality. This should be a big step forward!
"Scientists have invented a car that runs on pecans. That sounds like a good idea until you consider that pecans are like $10 a jar."
Hmm, the didn't say anything about the mileage, did they?:-)
Having read a couple of responses from researchers in this field, I think that this is nothing more than proof of concept. The researcher himself, professor Kaufmann says practical use is several years away.
I mean, is this really the right answer? Do I need 20 copies of the same damned.NET DLL on my disk, one for
each application? I think not. I do not consider this an intelligent move at all.
I now virtually nothing about MS Windows and MS's plans for it, but I do remember the commotion here on/. a year or so ago when MS patented "a new OS feature", basically automatic links. You can have as many copies of same file on disk as you want, without using more space than one file. When an application wants to change a file, the link is substituted with a real file.
Managing DLL:s was the purpose of this "invention".
Slashdot Mirror
A drastic procedure does not necessarily mean greater (as in better) effect. For instance, it is has been shown in recent years that surgery for severe ulcer does not have an effect, contrary to what has benn believed for a long time. If people have been "cured" by such procedures, it has been a pure placebo effect! In fact, without reading the article (hey this is /.!), I am thinking that the very fact that people have to rest their wrists after surgery could have something to do with the better results!
Lars
I am impressed by how you stood firm against that bully! Good job.
The pager presence is a good point; Analog mobiles is not. Sweden and Finland, two of the most GSM dense countries since the start of GSM, both had a very successful analog mobile net called NMT. In fact it is still in use in the northern parts simply because of it better range.
I am not sure why GSM so quickly replaced NMT, but I think the GSM phones were smaller right away.
I am by no means a gamer. In fact, I rarely play computer games. But whenever I have actually sat down in front of a game, I have been utterly confused as to what I am actually seeing on the screen and how to make things happen. I have yet to see a "slick" user interface!
I mean, standard widgets does not seem to be used, and the designers seem to prefer using unreadable fonts in order to get as much info onto screen and/or look good/cool/ethnic/timely. Also, I have not been impressed by the use of colors to help users discern what is going on.
Am I the only one to feel this way? Or am I simply too uninformed to state my opinion? I'll admit that I have not tried a game in a couple of years, but I do look at pretty pictures on the web and in magazines once in a while.
What I am actually trying to say is that this is an area where open source could actually make an impact. While writing a game engine is hard and designing graphics is cumbersome and requires artistic skills, hashing around different fonts, widget placements, quick keys, and views could well be possible without too much expertise.
As to their method, please see my other post. It is certainly public, and it will be scrutinized by other researchers for sure. You can visit your closest research library and look it up in Nature. In short, they do not use DNA for their analysis, only the fossil record.
Cheers,
Contrary to what people here at /. are expecting, the authors do not use molecular data in their method (although they have compared their findings with studies using DNA). Instead, they have used a model for how species appears and goes extinct, modelled how the fossil record has been sampled, and then compared with known fossil data.
The speciation/extinction model says that species go extinct and split up in subspecies at certain rates. The fossil findings model is simply that the number of found fossils from a certain period of time is binomially distributed.
Data summarizing the number of primate fossils from different time periods was collected, and a starting point for the primate lineage that best explained the fossil record was computed.
In essence, if the starting point is too early, the method disqualifies it because we have not seen enough fossils, and if it is too late, it is disqualified because we have seen too many.
I could add that Simon Tavare is a well-respected statistician with solid experience in, for example, population genetics. (I don't recognize the other author names.) It would have been nice to see comments from other researchers about their assumptions, but I did not see anything on the Nature site and have not had the time to research this more closely.
Cheers,
So they had body doubles already back then, huh? I thought that was a Hollywood invention!
I'll admit that I am no expert on PS, and know even less about PDF, but in what respect is PS "more closed" that PDF?! The whole language is publicly published and easily accessible for free to anyone near by a library. There are also countless implementations of PS interpreters.
I thought this was they way to go and was very excited to find fvwm2 (as DunbarTheInept above) support this feature. However, using it was quite a different issue. I found myself throwing the mouse left and right to get the screen to center where I wanted it. I was so used to rely on the display borders to act as mouse stoppers, that whenever I moved focus to another window, I would also scroll the desktop simply because I always hit the screen edges with the mouse.
This style of desktop also had, for me, the unfortunate side effect of distributing the windows over a too large estate. This meant that when I suddenly wanted to windows close to each other, it was always hard to setup because they were far away from each other on the virtual desktop.
I gave the whole thing up.
Unless you were writing this from a WebTV pad, your claim carries no weight with me!
Just some light-weight trolling...
I'll admit that I have never done any large scale programming, but this statement about language lock-in seems entirely false to me. I have done programming for research purposes and combined C with C++, C with Scheme, and used tools mostly written in C call Fortran libraries. I have seen and used examples of Perl and Python programs accessing common C libraries.
Where is the lock-in?
But users of ResearchIndex then have the option of rating papers on a scale 1 to 5, and if memory serves me, also comment on the paper.
Nevertheless, it is a great system!
The press release from the Sanger Center actually says that they have a vaccine undergoing trials and that the sequencing efforts from this project helped the research for the vaccine. You don't need a full genome to do sequence analysis. Indeed, if you have some idea for what you are looking for, you can find fairly efficiently. The scientists were saying they knew that the bacteria modified itself and they even knew that it did it 1500 years ago. How do they know that? Would anyone with some knowledge of this care to speculate?
Here is a speculation, because I have not read the actual Nature paper: They recognize some genomic material in the bacteria coming from some other bacteria. By analysing the amount of mutations in the incorporated material, they can get an estimate of how long ago it was incorporated.
Speculation 2: They computed evolutionary tree for different strains of plague bacteria and its relatives based on some genomic region with nice properties. This tree could give you estimates for when the strains started to deviate. Then, by studying for what bacteria the new modified material is common, you can decide the earliest point of inclusion.
- Sanger Center project page with additional info for the data hungry.
- Press release on which the news articles are based.
- Nature Science Update's take on the news
This can be seen as blatant karma-whoring, but I would really appreciate if submitters of science stories dug out links like these before posting. Gives much better credibility, IMHO.From their press-release: "Details of the sequencing are posted on the internet so the information is freely available to researchers around the world."
I actually thought European companies brought forth WAP, but i could be wrong on that one. However, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemes, and other big European players are still coming out with WAP phones and touting the technology, although perhaps not with the same magnitude of hype as two years ago.
There are also people out investing time and resources in producing WAP services. Take a look at BioWAP for instance! (I have heard that it is pretty easy to set up a WAP service though.)
What you claim is a main problem is nothing less than the regular course of tech business in general, and has certainly been done before in the telecom business. One can argue that GSM was created that way (although apparently there also were practical needs behind the standard), and certainly SMS was created before there was demand!
I don't think this is true, although I don't know for sure. Lego are very careful with registering design patents, making sure that other cannot sell similar toys. I remember seeing a news item as a boy that the most fundamental Lego patent had expired, so other companies could start selling compatible building blocks. "Great, cheap lego!" was my thought. However, that cheap Lego also turned out to be crappy and ugly, so I didn't go for it.
There are big differences with drugs for fighting AIDS. The treatments based on those drugs go on indefinately, so the cost is substantial also for an industrialised country. One single blood transfusion can make a big difference for a person, and could hopefully be affordable by a western world charity.
There is also not much of competition in the AIDS treatment business. As others have pointed out here, blood donations work pretty well already today, so if/when blood productions become industrialised, it must be made so efficiantly that the cost beats the blood donation system. This means price pressure in a way that we do not find on AIDS drugs.
Even if a third world country can not afford the drugs or the necessary infrastructure for same drugs, they can still benefit from charities and UN programs. I may have nice dreams on this topic, but they are not unrealistic. You have dreams too, but they are just nightmares. Progress is not benefitting from such pessimism.
At least the introduction and some of the discussion is readable for a layman like me. People with paranoid ideas about non-ethical and safety-blind researchers would benefit reading some if this. To quote:
Charity organisation doing medical work in third world countries are able to buy basic drugs. Imagine the Red Cross being able to buy cheap blood in bulk and bring it in to disaster areas. They are certainly able to use anti-biotics large quantities. Why would cheap blood be any different?
You are truly underestimating the effect of industrialisation.
If scientists could get stem cells to grow faster and under a more controlled fashion, it could allow for a large scale industrial fabrication of blood. It would put an end to shortages and also probably lower costs. Instead of screening your pint of blood for HIV, typhus or whatever, a large batch could be checked for quality. This should be a big step forward!
"Scientists have invented a car that runs on pecans. That sounds like a good idea until you consider that pecans are like $10 a jar."
Hmm, the didn't say anything about the mileage, did they? :-)
Having read a couple of responses from researchers in this field, I think that this is nothing more than proof of concept. The researcher himself, professor Kaufmann says practical use is several years away.
I now virtually nothing about MS Windows and MS's plans for it, but I do remember the commotion here on /. a year or so ago when MS patented "a new OS feature", basically automatic links. You can have as many copies of same file on disk as you want, without using more space than one file. When an application wants to change a file, the link is substituted with a real file.
Managing DLL:s was the purpose of this "invention".
Lars
__