I was fortunate to be able to use a 1st-gen "cheap" scanning tunneling microscope when I was a college freshman (this was in 1997). This thing was really cool. I think it had a resolution of about 0.1 micron. One of the things the designers showed me was a bit of a CD-- you could actually see the "pits" and "lands". They wanted to build these things cheaply enough to get them into high schools. If I recall correctly, their target price was something like $10k.
The purpose in me being there for was to see if I could construct a "tip" for this device on my own. They were using some kind of wire, and were cutting it with a hand tool. One of the designers showed me how to do this, but I was unable to produce a tip sharp enough to be usable.
Anyway-- I'm all for bringing advanced scientific equipment into schools. After all, the same debate happened over early computers in high schools, and while those students weren't doing anything "useful" with the computers, it produced an entire generation of scientists, programmers, and technicians who knew how to use computers.
Info is a little hard to find about the STM I used, but I was able to find this:
INEXPENSIVE SCANNING TUNNELING MICROSCOPES FOR UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION: AN UPDATE. Philip H. Lippel , Christian A. Murphy and John P. Cumings, L3 Consulting, Boston, MA; Jack Lochhead, TERC, Cambridge, MA; Kevin Johnson, Chemistry Department, Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR.
We will present an update on our efforts to introduce Scanning Tunneling Microscopy into introductory college science courses. At a previous symposium (Lippel and Johnson, J. Mater. Educ. 19, 65-75, 1997) we described the design of a low-cost STM and proposed a rationale for introducing students to this instrument early in the undergraduate curriculum. We now present preliminary data concerning STM-based student investigations of materials nanostructure. We will display student-generated images of easily prepared model systems (cleaved semiconductors, polished elemental metals), and also of the surfaces of mass-manufactured objects such as compact discs and diffraction gratings. We will then describe undergraduate investigations of such time dependent phenomenon as electrodeposition and oxidation. Student and faculty comments regarding the relevancy of these observations to the standard curriculum, and their potential for generating enthusiasm regarding materials science, will be discussed.
The growing popularity of scanned probe imaging techniques, especially their burgeoning impact on manufacturing processes, generates a need for improved public understanding of science at nanometer scales. We have generated a plan to create hands-on, museum based demonstrations of scanning tunneling microscopy for general audiences. Our scheme involves three linked components: 1) introducing undergraduates to STM technology in first year laboratories; 2) creating opportunities for interested students to receive additional STM training through undergraduate research experiences; 3) placing selected students, during or following their research experience, in museum internships where they would design and manage STM demonstrations for public groups. We propose that this could be best accomplished through a network of university/museum partnerships that would share knowledge and conduct common training programs. Network sites- both universities and museums- should be selected to insure strong participation by usually underrepresented groups.
This work is sponsored by the National Science Foundation SBIR program, Award Number DMI-9630558.
The statistics are hard to make out, but it seems that doctors were more likely to kill you than cure your for a large portion of history
You might enjoy reading Trick or Treatment-- they cover this topic in some detail. You right, statistics are hard to come by, mainly because no one was keeping statistics at the time. Florence Nightengale changed that.
And water had nothing to do with that.
Clean water and disease/infection are two sides of the same coin. In fact, Florence Nightengale herself worked over the course of her life to show that things like water quality, open sewers, air pollution, and nutrition had dramatic effects of the health of a population.
Freedom to make one's own decisions about medical treatment is a big thing in the US, and people dislike when they are compelled against their will. I'm no exception.
See, though-- there are some things you just can't control. Boo-hoo, it's raining. No, you can't park your car there. No, you can't keep dumping industrial pollutants out your back door.
Vaccination is often all or nothing. Call it tyranny of the majority if you like-- most of us want to live. Deal with it.
Being cognizant of the spread of the virus has a much higher success rate in preventing infection than does immunization.
This simply means that you willfully misunderstand statistics. A vaccine that saves millions of lives at the risk of a few hundred is a justifiable risk. The same logic applies to warfare: we sacrifice the lives of the few to save the many. It is painful and regrettable, but it must be done.
That is a FAR cry from saying that vaccines "cause disease" or that this is a manufactured pandemic to make money.
At least 62% of the U.S. population is under the age of 45. How does conferred immunity from the 1957 asian flu help them? What about the world?
You may have only gotten the flu once. The plural of anecdote is not data. Epidemiology is data, and it argues against you.
If your car never fails in the 10 years that you drive it, does it mean that mechanics are perpetrating fraud? Think about it.
Nonsense. My wife, a former lab researcher and now doctor, worked with many people involved in communicable diseases and public health (she worked on yersinia pestis). These people devote their lives to understanding these diseases, and take the job very seriously. Another good friend of mine studies brain diseases. If he's in it for the money... well, he's an idiot. You see the same kind of dedication in these people that you do with firefighters. They do it because they're helping people.
Why is H1N1 a big deal? Since you're here at Slashdot, you probably have some computer background, so I suggest you read this. Money quote:
Some of these mutations make no difference; others render the virus harmless; and quite possibly, some render the virus much more dangerous. Since viruses are replicated and distributed in astronomical quantities, the chance that this little hack could end up occurring naturally is in fact quite high. This is part of the reason, I think, why the health officials are so worried about H1N1: we have no resistance to it, and even though it’s not quite so deadly today, it’s probably just a couple mutations away from being a much bigger health problem.
It's good to be a skeptic, but when you're too "skeptical" to accept what experts tell you (oh, wait, you're a biologist specializing in human disease?), you're willfully ignoring the obvious.
Vendors is in quotes, as an open source project team really isn't a vendor.
True, but it also gives Microsoft the most bang for their buck, since by working with Samba developers, the information gets out there for everyone to see. If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft requires you to pay for their documentation. Samba's interoperability is documentation in a real sense (and source code is almost always better documentation than something that a technical writer came up with), and this lowers the barrier to getting that information. I think that the EU will view this favorably, which is probably why Microsoft is doing this.
As a side note-- my gut feeling is that nowadays, Microsoft's closed-off protocols are a hindrance to them. At this point in the game, the lock-in is well-known and I think that works against Microsoft with many sysadmins planning new deployments. If, on the other hand, there is a large and open software ecosystem, sysadmins will look on Microsoft products more favorably. E.g., Exchange is quite full-featured as a groupware platform, relatively scalable, and fairly easy to use, but lock-in, cost, and infrastructure requirements are problems. But if someone can set up a Samba4 AD and run Exchange on top of it-- or even better, the other way around-- now we're talking. Microsoft's attitude up to this point, though, has made many people (me included) simply work to ditch the existing Microsoft software we use.
I can assure you that TV and computers are the lesser of the evils here. I'd rather have prisoners watching TV than finding new and exciting ways to shiv the prison guards.
Your post doesn't compile. I think you need one of these:
)
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Well, by that logic, homosexuality doesn't impact (heh) ONLY homosexuals, either. It definitely affects other people, particularly people who don't like homosexuals. Whether you think that's something we should care about is a different matter.
What I think you meant was: smoking doesn't kill only the smoker.
Next conservative rallying cry: "homosexuality kills!"
OTOH, while "Kafka-esque" phenomena may be the result of a person inventing their own struggles, in Kafka's stories, this is often the result of a misconception or lack of information on that person's part. E.g., in Before the Law, the person waits patiently outside The Law his entire life because he never knew that he could just go in. He never thought to try. Control of information is an essential component of bureaucracy, and it's one of the most frustrating things people encounter in our legal system. You already have to be a part of the system in order to know how to use it to your advantage, the end result being that our legal system is very unfair. A system that is ostensibly set up to serve you and which preys on your ignorance to do precisely the opposite? That is Kafka-esque.
It's a false dichotomy. Aside from system policy (e.g., scheduler, security, etc), there should be no difference between server and desktop operating systems. They're both essentially doing the same thing (caveat: realtime systems are genuinely different beasts) I think what you find in BSD-land is the recognition that policy-neutral code is a good thing. That's how you end up with entire projects (like OpenBSD) that comfortably fit in small spaces. Lots of code reuse.
Sure, and by that measure Windows Server 2003 and Linux 2.4 experience is totally worthless, too.
Apple's stuff may have gotten more pleasant to use, but come on, there haven't been any earth-shaking changes going on from a sysadmin's perspective. Besides, 10.4 Server came out in April of 2005. That's 4 years ago. I think you'll still find it widely deployed in Apple environments.
I haven't explored all of the features yet, but yes, it can audit all of the software and hardware connected to the user's machine. You can have it generate reports on a schedule if you want, too.
The only problem with Mac OS X Server (and this is speaking from 10.3-10.4 experience; maybe 10.6 server is better) is that if Apple's grand vision for your network doesn't fit your own vision, then Mac OS X Server is next to useless. The problem is that Apple has preconfigured a number of built-in services, and changing them causes major headaches.
For instance, in 10.4, any change to the GUI would overwrite your/etc/smb.conf. What's worse is that Apple often runs old versions of this software. If, say, you want to go out and run the latest Samba, nothing is stopping you, but expect parts of Apple's system to break. Sure, I admit, lots of people go this route and have many workarounds for Apple's stuff, but for us, we figured: if we're going to do all this work to circumvent Apple's packaged stuff, why not just run Linux? So that's what we run on our backend now. We even run Netatalk, which has to be the simplest daemon I've ever configured-- it basically worked with PAM+winbind right out of the box, and so we're able to authenticate our AFP clients against AD, too.
If you're a very small shop, and you want a simple drop-in fileserver, Mac OS X will probably work for you. If you want a simple Open Directory, and don't have an existing directory system, Mac OS X will probably work for you. But get any more complex than that and you might as well use something else.
Apple Software Restore, which comes "in the box". We set up a base machine, populate the/System/Library/User Templates/English.lproj/ and then make a disk image to our fileserver using ASR. Then, boot new machines in Target Disk Mode and deploy the image using your workstation.
We could probably come up with something clever using a boot partition, but this works fine for us. If you want to get fine-grained, have a look at Radmind but keep in mind that Adobe apps will thwart your every attempt to manage them at that level.
All of the above are Free/free. We handle patching using Apple Remote Desktop (not free, but well worth the money). You can also configure your machines to authenticate against an Active Directory (like we do); if you're willing to modify your schema, you can even manage your installation from your MMC snap-ins like you can with Windows boxen.
And nevermind the ethical implications of short-circuiting a natural defense mechanism -- we might give cockroaches and other insects, that make up a significant amount of the biomass, the ability to spread diseases on a massive scale, since they aren't afraid of their dead anymore.
Sure, but the presence of and behavior resulting from this organ is an advantage to that animal. If it were not, it most likely would not be present in the first place.
Animals that are "naturally selected" to eat crops that are treated with this chemical thus gain an advantage (more food) at the expense of another (death avoidance). It may turn out that these new bugs are worse off than their "natural" counterparts, and are either an unsuccessful breed, or can only survive in niche ecologies. If they cause the spread of disease, so what? They all die off. Problem solved.
We inadvertently select certain animal traits all the time, just by being here. Sewers, for example, harbor all kinds of animals that are different from their natural counterparts. Not to mention the animals and crops that we select for intentionally, like horses (which no longer even have a natural counterpart) or maize (which doesn't even remotely resemble its wild type).
PSUs occasionally fail spectacularly. In the 6 years that I've worked at my current workplace, we've seen two PSUs fail like this. One of them exploded; fortunately the explosion was limited to inside the PSU chassis, although it was smoking heavily. The other was sending sparks out the back.
Put it this way: my brother is a fire safety engineer; he interviewed at APC (a power supply company) to do failure analysis of their equipment for fire-safety purposes (he ended up taking another job). Every consumer electronics device has to meet fire safety codes. Computers are no exception.
TFA is light on details, but I wonder: how does this deal with interference? For consumer electronics, that's a big deal. Aluminum foil? What about flammability?
I think this is a neat way of thinking about a case. The "spill" issue unfortunately makes it a non-starter where I work... let's just say that many of the people I work with are idiots. For my own personal projects, I prefer a nice case that I reuse for a long time (like a Lian-Li).
The fungal attack changes the cell structure of the wood, reducing its density and simultaneously increasing its homogeneity. "Compared to a conventional instrument, a violin made of wood treated with the fungus has a warmer, more rounded sound," explains Francis Schwarze.
But other than that, you're right, not much to go on.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose in me being there for was to see if I could construct a "tip" for this device on my own. They were using some kind of wire, and were cutting it with a hand tool. One of the designers showed me how to do this, but I was unable to produce a tip sharp enough to be usable.
Anyway-- I'm all for bringing advanced scientific equipment into schools. After all, the same debate happened over early computers in high schools, and while those students weren't doing anything "useful" with the computers, it produced an entire generation of scientists, programmers, and technicians who knew how to use computers.
Info is a little hard to find about the STM I used, but I was able to find this:
INEXPENSIVE SCANNING TUNNELING MICROSCOPES FOR UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION: AN UPDATE. Philip H. Lippel , Christian A. Murphy and John P. Cumings, L3 Consulting, Boston, MA; Jack Lochhead, TERC, Cambridge, MA; Kevin Johnson, Chemistry Department, Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR.
We will present an update on our efforts to introduce Scanning Tunneling Microscopy into introductory college science courses. At a previous symposium (Lippel and Johnson, J. Mater. Educ. 19, 65-75, 1997) we described the design of a low-cost STM and proposed a rationale for introducing students to this instrument early in the undergraduate curriculum. We now present preliminary data concerning STM-based student investigations of materials nanostructure. We will display student-generated images of easily prepared model systems (cleaved semiconductors, polished elemental metals), and also of the surfaces of mass-manufactured objects such as compact discs and diffraction gratings. We will then describe undergraduate investigations of such time dependent phenomenon as electrodeposition and oxidation. Student and faculty comments regarding the relevancy of these observations to the standard curriculum, and their potential for generating enthusiasm regarding materials science, will be discussed.
The growing popularity of scanned probe imaging techniques, especially their burgeoning impact on manufacturing processes, generates a need for improved public understanding of science at nanometer scales. We have generated a plan to create hands-on, museum based demonstrations of scanning tunneling microscopy for general audiences. Our scheme involves three linked components: 1) introducing undergraduates to STM technology in first year laboratories; 2) creating opportunities for interested students to receive additional STM training through undergraduate research experiences; 3) placing selected students, during or following their research experience, in museum internships where they would design and manage STM demonstrations for public groups. We propose that this could be best accomplished through a network of university/museum partnerships that would share knowledge and conduct common training programs. Network sites- both universities and museums- should be selected to insure strong participation by usually underrepresented groups. This work is sponsored by the National Science Foundation SBIR program, Award Number DMI-9630558.
The statistics are hard to make out, but it seems that doctors were more likely to kill you than cure your for a large portion of history
You might enjoy reading Trick or Treatment-- they cover this topic in some detail. You right, statistics are hard to come by, mainly because no one was keeping statistics at the time. Florence Nightengale changed that.
And water had nothing to do with that.
Clean water and disease/infection are two sides of the same coin. In fact, Florence Nightengale herself worked over the course of her life to show that things like water quality, open sewers, air pollution, and nutrition had dramatic effects of the health of a population.
Freedom to make one's own decisions about medical treatment is a big thing in the US, and people dislike when they are compelled against their will. I'm no exception.
See, though-- there are some things you just can't control. Boo-hoo, it's raining. No, you can't park your car there. No, you can't keep dumping industrial pollutants out your back door.
Vaccination is often all or nothing. Call it tyranny of the majority if you like-- most of us want to live. Deal with it.
Being cognizant of the spread of the virus has a much higher success rate in preventing infection than does immunization.
I call bullshit. Citation, please.
This simply means that you willfully misunderstand statistics. A vaccine that saves millions of lives at the risk of a few hundred is a justifiable risk. The same logic applies to warfare: we sacrifice the lives of the few to save the many. It is painful and regrettable, but it must be done.
That is a FAR cry from saying that vaccines "cause disease" or that this is a manufactured pandemic to make money.
At least 62% of the U.S. population is under the age of 45. How does conferred immunity from the 1957 asian flu help them? What about the world?
You may have only gotten the flu once. The plural of anecdote is not data. Epidemiology is data, and it argues against you.
If your car never fails in the 10 years that you drive it, does it mean that mechanics are perpetrating fraud? Think about it.
Why is H1N1 a big deal? Since you're here at Slashdot, you probably have some computer background, so I suggest you read this. Money quote:
Some of these mutations make no difference; others render the virus harmless; and quite possibly, some render the virus much more dangerous. Since viruses are replicated and distributed in astronomical quantities, the chance that this little hack could end up occurring naturally is in fact quite high. This is part of the reason, I think, why the health officials are so worried about H1N1: we have no resistance to it, and even though it’s not quite so deadly today, it’s probably just a couple mutations away from being a much bigger health problem.
It's good to be a skeptic, but when you're too "skeptical" to accept what experts tell you (oh, wait, you're a biologist specializing in human disease?), you're willfully ignoring the obvious.
Vendors is in quotes, as an open source project team really isn't a vendor.
True, but it also gives Microsoft the most bang for their buck, since by working with Samba developers, the information gets out there for everyone to see. If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft requires you to pay for their documentation. Samba's interoperability is documentation in a real sense (and source code is almost always better documentation than something that a technical writer came up with), and this lowers the barrier to getting that information. I think that the EU will view this favorably, which is probably why Microsoft is doing this.
As a side note-- my gut feeling is that nowadays, Microsoft's closed-off protocols are a hindrance to them. At this point in the game, the lock-in is well-known and I think that works against Microsoft with many sysadmins planning new deployments. If, on the other hand, there is a large and open software ecosystem, sysadmins will look on Microsoft products more favorably. E.g., Exchange is quite full-featured as a groupware platform, relatively scalable, and fairly easy to use, but lock-in, cost, and infrastructure requirements are problems. But if someone can set up a Samba4 AD and run Exchange on top of it-- or even better, the other way around-- now we're talking. Microsoft's attitude up to this point, though, has made many people (me included) simply work to ditch the existing Microsoft software we use.
I can assure you that TV and computers are the lesser of the evils here. I'd rather have prisoners watching TV than finding new and exciting ways to shiv the prison guards.
Awesome. I can't wait until they partner with Cisco and rewrite IOS in Flash :P
Your post doesn't compile. I think you need one of these:
)
Well, by that logic, homosexuality doesn't impact (heh) ONLY homosexuals, either. It definitely affects other people, particularly people who don't like homosexuals. Whether you think that's something we should care about is a different matter.
What I think you meant was: smoking doesn't kill only the smoker.
Next conservative rallying cry: "homosexuality kills!"
OTOH, while "Kafka-esque" phenomena may be the result of a person inventing their own struggles, in Kafka's stories, this is often the result of a misconception or lack of information on that person's part. E.g., in Before the Law, the person waits patiently outside The Law his entire life because he never knew that he could just go in. He never thought to try. Control of information is an essential component of bureaucracy, and it's one of the most frustrating things people encounter in our legal system. You already have to be a part of the system in order to know how to use it to your advantage, the end result being that our legal system is very unfair. A system that is ostensibly set up to serve you and which preys on your ignorance to do precisely the opposite? That is Kafka-esque.
It's a false dichotomy. Aside from system policy (e.g., scheduler, security, etc), there should be no difference between server and desktop operating systems. They're both essentially doing the same thing (caveat: realtime systems are genuinely different beasts) I think what you find in BSD-land is the recognition that policy-neutral code is a good thing. That's how you end up with entire projects (like OpenBSD) that comfortably fit in small spaces. Lots of code reuse.
Clearly a kernel binary interface is a waste of time, then.
I throw up violently every time I'm around Beanut Putter & Jelly. Avoid the BP&Js, kids!
Sure, and by that measure Windows Server 2003 and Linux 2.4 experience is totally worthless, too.
Apple's stuff may have gotten more pleasant to use, but come on, there haven't been any earth-shaking changes going on from a sysadmin's perspective. Besides, 10.4 Server came out in April of 2005. That's 4 years ago. I think you'll still find it widely deployed in Apple environments.
I haven't explored all of the features yet, but yes, it can audit all of the software and hardware connected to the user's machine. You can have it generate reports on a schedule if you want, too.
Screen Sharing is only a small part of ARD. ARD gives you an admin console that allows you to audit your network and deploy software.
I should also add that we use SSH a lot.
The only problem with Mac OS X Server (and this is speaking from 10.3-10.4 experience; maybe 10.6 server is better) is that if Apple's grand vision for your network doesn't fit your own vision, then Mac OS X Server is next to useless. The problem is that Apple has preconfigured a number of built-in services, and changing them causes major headaches.
/etc/smb.conf. What's worse is that Apple often runs old versions of this software. If, say, you want to go out and run the latest Samba, nothing is stopping you, but expect parts of Apple's system to break. Sure, I admit, lots of people go this route and have many workarounds for Apple's stuff, but for us, we figured: if we're going to do all this work to circumvent Apple's packaged stuff, why not just run Linux? So that's what we run on our backend now. We even run Netatalk, which has to be the simplest daemon I've ever configured-- it basically worked with PAM+winbind right out of the box, and so we're able to authenticate our AFP clients against AD, too.
For instance, in 10.4, any change to the GUI would overwrite your
If you're a very small shop, and you want a simple drop-in fileserver, Mac OS X will probably work for you. If you want a simple Open Directory, and don't have an existing directory system, Mac OS X will probably work for you. But get any more complex than that and you might as well use something else.
Apple Software Restore, which comes "in the box". We set up a base machine, populate the /System/Library/User Templates/English.lproj/ and then make a disk image to our fileserver using ASR. Then, boot new machines in Target Disk Mode and deploy the image using your workstation.
We could probably come up with something clever using a boot partition, but this works fine for us. If you want to get fine-grained, have a look at Radmind but keep in mind that Adobe apps will thwart your every attempt to manage them at that level.
All of the above are Free/free. We handle patching using Apple Remote Desktop (not free, but well worth the money). You can also configure your machines to authenticate against an Active Directory (like we do); if you're willing to modify your schema, you can even manage your installation from your MMC snap-ins like you can with Windows boxen.
And nevermind the ethical implications of short-circuiting a natural defense mechanism -- we might give cockroaches and other insects, that make up a significant amount of the biomass, the ability to spread diseases on a massive scale, since they aren't afraid of their dead anymore.
Sure, but the presence of and behavior resulting from this organ is an advantage to that animal. If it were not, it most likely would not be present in the first place.
Animals that are "naturally selected" to eat crops that are treated with this chemical thus gain an advantage (more food) at the expense of another (death avoidance). It may turn out that these new bugs are worse off than their "natural" counterparts, and are either an unsuccessful breed, or can only survive in niche ecologies. If they cause the spread of disease, so what? They all die off. Problem solved.
We inadvertently select certain animal traits all the time, just by being here. Sewers, for example, harbor all kinds of animals that are different from their natural counterparts. Not to mention the animals and crops that we select for intentionally, like horses (which no longer even have a natural counterpart) or maize (which doesn't even remotely resemble its wild type).
Fortunately, in Massachusetts, we all ride bicycles. I think they put it on the handlebars or something.
PSUs occasionally fail spectacularly. In the 6 years that I've worked at my current workplace, we've seen two PSUs fail like this. One of them exploded; fortunately the explosion was limited to inside the PSU chassis, although it was smoking heavily. The other was sending sparks out the back.
Put it this way: my brother is a fire safety engineer; he interviewed at APC (a power supply company) to do failure analysis of their equipment for fire-safety purposes (he ended up taking another job). Every consumer electronics device has to meet fire safety codes. Computers are no exception.
TFA is light on details, but I wonder: how does this deal with interference? For consumer electronics, that's a big deal. Aluminum foil? What about flammability?
I think this is a neat way of thinking about a case. The "spill" issue unfortunately makes it a non-starter where I work... let's just say that many of the people I work with are idiots. For my own personal projects, I prefer a nice case that I reuse for a long time (like a Lian-Li).
Also, importantly, it appears that the audience members could talk to each other.
The fungal attack changes the cell structure of the wood, reducing its density and simultaneously increasing its homogeneity. "Compared to a conventional instrument, a violin made of wood treated with the fungus has a warmer, more rounded sound," explains Francis Schwarze.
But other than that, you're right, not much to go on.