The subject pretty much expresses my opinion. Many stutterers, including myself, seldom stutter during normal speech. But place us in any sort of stressful situation (eg. speech on demand), and I'll be darned if the stuttering doesn't start up.
Classic situations - responding to a business phone call isn't a problem. Initiating a phone call to a business sucks.
I fear that voice fingerprinting, where one has to verify one's identity in a time-limited manner is going to be hell for us.
I'm sure the 1% of humans who stutter (to whatever degree) would prefer retinal scans!!
In case the sentence, "... he taught for several years at Stanford University..." leads anyone to believe that Cringely was on the Stanford faculty.
Cringely was a graduate student at Stanford, during which time, he TA'ed a few classes. He never finished graduate school. Since then he has claimed (and then retracted) that he had a Ph.D. and had been an Assistant Professor at Stanford. When confronted, with the truth, he first opined that he thought being a TA was the same as being an Assistant Professor, and then removed the Assistant Professor and Ph.D. bit from his official bio.
Caused more than a little stir in academic circles in 1998. Here's the
link from the Stanford Daily online from 1998.
The article is not a fake. Irving Vermilya was a pioneer in the formative years of amateur radio in the US. He caught the bug after listening to talk by Marconi when he was twelve. He was one of the first members of the Radio Club of America, using the call sign VN, and was the first licensed amateur radio operator in the US. Later in life he switched to the callsign W1-ZE. Here's a short biography of this remarkable man.
There has been a lot of speculation about how Steve Jobs' cancer was diagnosed, and whether he has annuals CT scans or MRIs.
I don't know if he does, but the neuroendocrine tumor in his islet cells would have affected insulin production which in turn would have caused symptoms such as:
intense sweating, anxiety, hunger
tremor, rapid heart rate
dizziness, obscured vision
rapid fluctuations in weight
diarrhea, abdominal pain, possible vomiting of blood
Steve's doctors would have tested for a number of things including:
elevated serum glucagon
elevated fasting glucose levels, and high glucose tolerance
elevated levels of serum insulin
possibly increased levels of gastrin (which would cause the increased hunger)
They would have have then ordered abdominal MRI scans, because these tumors (in the Islet of Langerhans) would likely be too small to see by CT scans). If the MRIs were positive, surgery would be next.
If the tumor had metastasized, a portion of the liver would have also been removed, and chemotherapy would have been used. As that appears not to be the case, Steve's tumor is likely a pre-malignant lesion.
I couldn't respond yesterday, as I was stuck all day at meetings.
Anyway, while these results from Prusiner and colleagues go a long way toward demonstrating the infectivity of prions, there are still some problems with the experiment before one can conclude that Koch's postulates have been satisfied.
I've listed some of the problems (potential and real) with the experiment here:
The strain of mice used is a transgenic strain that expresses 16 times the normal level of the prion protein (PrP). There are some in the field who say that the high level of PrP expression in this strain makes them unusually sensitive to developing neurological disease to ANY environmental perturbation.
Prusiner's lab has many other prion strains. Laura Manuelidis, a neuropathologist at Yale, has said that the pathology of brain samples from these mice closely resemble RML scrapie. It is very important to eliminate the possibility that they developed disease by cross-contamination from another prion strain. Recall that the goal of the research is prove one of Koch's postulates that PrP is directly infectious, rather than any nucleic acid associated with a prion.
Finally, injection of the same recombinant (E. coli produced) PrP fragments into normal mice that do not produce 16 times the amount of PrP do not produce disease. Producing disease in normal mice would be the best demonstration of Koch's postulates.
BTW, my scientific background is not in prions. I direct a lab that works on Epstein-Barr virus.
Sal's website doesn't really shed light on who Vince Messina (sic) is, and Justin's bandwidth can't handle the Slashdot effect!
Here's a link to a story on NBC10 (Philadelphia). Turns out that Vincent Massina is a South Philadelphia businessman who was defrauded of about $13,000 by Sal Wise.
Why am I not surprised that Sal has managed to twist this around?
The submitter didn't catch this, and no one else seems to have pointed it out, but 1194.10 mpg (obtained by the Rose-Hulman team) was not the third highest mpg. Rose-Hulman was third amongst collegiate teams. If the high-school teams are included, Rose-Hulman drops to fifth place. Overall, Evansville Mater Dei (1352.58 mpg) was third, and Winamac (1235.33 mpg) was fourth. First and second remain Univ. of British Columbia, and Cal. State LA.
The link to Volvo is wrong. Volvo has nothing to do with Volvo cars. Volvo Corporation makes trucks, marine engines, aircraft engines, and used to make cars. The automobile division was sold to Ford about 7 years ago. The correct link is VolvoCars. Long-time Volvo enthusiasts, such as myself (who loved our 140s, 240, and 740s) are somewhat skeptical of the quality of the newer Volvo cars made under Ford management. For instance the latest S40 (due out this spring) shares a common platform with the Ford Focus and the Mazda 3, but costs about twice as much because of the Volvo branding.
Mod the parent up. The link is to a really cool Mac SE upgrade to a G3/233 that runs OS X (10.2), has a CDROM and USB ports, while retaining the 9" Mac SE screen. Now that's a freakin' cool mod.
Not that weird. Trappist monasteries have been brewing beer for centuries. They've been making cheese as well. Perhaps the best known Trappist beer and cheese are from the Scourmont abbey in southern Belgium -- can you say Chimay:-)
No, but you can visualize prion proteins within intact cell with a conventional electron microscopy. I kid you not. Here's an article with some really pretty pictures of prion proteins trafficking in cells.
Yes, his post is completely wrong. However, there have been advances in STM so that you can do STM with fixed organic samples now. Here's an example of a recent published study. Also atomic force microscopy (AFM) has become fairly common with fixed organic samples. I'm not calling you wrong - I'm just updating Slashdot readers to the state of the art in biological microscopy.
Your comment makes little sense. My lab does a lot of microscopy. B & L strictly make optical microscopes, which by the wavelengths of light, and properties of glass are restricted to resolve objects down to about 100 nanometers or so (at best - and we're talking with a really really good confocal or deconvolution microscope that runs about $500K). Mediocre electron microscopes visualize objects down to about 1000 angstroms. That's two orders of magnitude better, perhaps more if you have a good EM setup.
Lets see - it turns out that the Voynich manuscript is likely a bunch of drivel that pictures of naked women. Looks like we haven't come that far since it was written, as this Filipino edition of FHM would suggest!
Perhaps we had best think of the turbines and your house as a way of selecting for smarter birds. The ones that learn to avoid them contribute to the next generation.
Now, if only we could we could select for smarter environmentalists.
This wasn't on television, and may hurt some religious sensibilities, but I thought this Christmas ad for Ann Summers was very very clever. Possibly NSFW, depending on where you work.
Re:Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter .
on
Smallpox From The Past
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If the virus is nothing but the DNA and a protein coating around it, why are the people wanting it to be live?
Am I missing something? What am I missing?
As a card-carrying virologist let me give you a run down on the information you're missing. If you don't consider the type of nucleic acid (RNA or DNA), there are two types of viruses that infect mammalian cells - enveloped and non-enveloped. Enveloped viruses (such as smallpox) have an outer lipid bilayer (the envelope) that is studded with glycoproteins that need to bind specific molecules on the surface of mammalian cells to permit fusion between the viral envelope and the cell membrane. Fusion allows the virus' nucleic acid to enter the cell. The viral envelope is very fragile, and breaks down rapidly when dried. When the envelope breaks down, it spills the contents of the virus out -- i.e. the nucleic acid, which in the absence of the envelope doesn't have a means to specifically enter a cell. This is one reason why wiping surfaces with 100% ethanol (a dehydrating agent) is quite effective against enveloped viruses like HIV.
Even viruses that are not enveloped have protein coats that directly interact with cell surface molecules that act as receptors to mediate the entry of these viruses into cells. The proteins that make up these coats also denature (lose their proper shape) with time, although this is typically a slower process.
Finally, how stable is the viral nucleic acid? Viral nucleic acids are typically not present as naked RNA or DNA, but in a complex of DNA or RNA with proteins that coat them. These coated nucleic acids are quite stable. Nucleic acid from DNA viruses (like smallpox) is likely to be more stable than nucleic acid from RNA viruses, and I'm guessing that they should be able to do phylogenetic studies on the strain of smallpox present in those scabs after amplifying recovered DNA by PCR.
BTW, after many years of Slashdot lurking, a wee bit of horn tooting. My lab works on how the genome of EBV latches on to human chromosomes. Here's a pretty picture from our work that was on the cover of the Journal of Virology last month.
I have a hard time believing that they can extract 10 ng of DNA from a fingerprint. A diploid human cell as 6x10e9 bp of DNA. One bp is 660 daltons. Calculating backward, 6x10e9 bp works out to being 6.6 pg of DNA.
So for them to extract 5-10 ng of DNA from a fingerprint, a fingerprint needs to contain between 1000 - 2000 cells. I work with epithelial cells, and a 1000 - 2000 cells is a fairly large patch of cells.
So either they mean that they get 10 ng of PCR amplified DNA (which is possible), but then is hardly representative of the entire genome, or they are using fingerprints from people who are really shedding skin!
Slashdot Mirror
Classic situations - responding to a business phone call isn't a problem. Initiating a phone call to a business sucks.
I fear that voice fingerprinting, where one has to verify one's identity in a time-limited manner is going to be hell for us.
I'm sure the 1% of humans who stutter (to whatever degree) would prefer retinal scans!!
In case the sentence, "... he taught for several years at Stanford University..." leads anyone to believe that Cringely was on the Stanford faculty.
Cringely was a graduate student at Stanford, during which time, he TA'ed a few classes. He never finished graduate school. Since then he has claimed (and then retracted) that he had a Ph.D. and had been an Assistant Professor at Stanford. When confronted, with the truth, he first opined that he thought being a TA was the same as being an Assistant Professor, and then removed the Assistant Professor and Ph.D. bit from his official bio.
Caused more than a little stir in academic circles in 1998. Here's the link from the Stanford Daily online from 1998.
I poo-poo your silly idea Philleas Fog..
The name Jules Verne used was Phineas Fogg. Not Philleas, not Fog.
The article is not a fake. Irving Vermilya was a pioneer in the formative years of amateur radio in the US. He caught the bug after listening to talk by Marconi when he was twelve. He was one of the first members of the Radio Club of America, using the call sign VN, and was the first licensed amateur radio operator in the US. Later in life he switched to the callsign W1-ZE. Here's a short biography of this remarkable man.
I don't know if he does, but the neuroendocrine tumor in his islet cells would have affected insulin production which in turn would have caused symptoms such as:
Steve's doctors would have tested for a number of things including:
They would have have then ordered abdominal MRI scans, because these tumors (in the Islet of Langerhans) would likely be too small to see by CT scans). If the MRIs were positive, surgery would be next.
If the tumor had metastasized, a portion of the liver would have also been removed, and chemotherapy would have been used. As that appears not to be the case, Steve's tumor is likely a pre-malignant lesion.
Anyway, while these results from Prusiner and colleagues go a long way toward demonstrating the infectivity of prions, there are still some problems with the experiment before one can conclude that Koch's postulates have been satisfied.
I've listed some of the problems (potential and real) with the experiment here:
BTW, my scientific background is not in prions. I direct a lab that works on Epstein-Barr virus.
Here's a link to a story on NBC10 (Philadelphia). Turns out that Vincent Massina is a South Philadelphia businessman who was defrauded of about $13,000 by Sal Wise.
Why am I not surprised that Sal has managed to twist this around?
The submitter didn't catch this, and no one else seems to have pointed it out, but 1194.10 mpg (obtained by the Rose-Hulman team) was not the third highest mpg. Rose-Hulman was third amongst collegiate teams. If the high-school teams are included, Rose-Hulman drops to fifth place. Overall, Evansville Mater Dei (1352.58 mpg) was third, and Winamac (1235.33 mpg) was fourth. First and second remain Univ. of British Columbia, and Cal. State LA.
People may remember librarian Brewster Kahle as the man behind Archive.org's Wayback Machine and the Internet Bookmobile.
I remember Brewster from when he developed WAIS ......
The link to Volvo is wrong. Volvo has nothing to do with Volvo cars. Volvo Corporation makes trucks, marine engines, aircraft engines, and used to make cars. The automobile division was sold to Ford about 7 years ago. The correct link is VolvoCars. Long-time Volvo enthusiasts, such as myself (who loved our 140s, 240, and 740s) are somewhat skeptical of the quality of the newer Volvo cars made under Ford management. For instance the latest S40 (due out this spring) shares a common platform with the Ford Focus and the Mazda 3, but costs about twice as much because of the Volvo branding.
Mod the parent up. The link is to a really cool Mac SE upgrade to a G3/233 that runs OS X (10.2), has a CDROM and USB ports, while retaining the 9" Mac SE screen. Now that's a freakin' cool mod.
Not that weird. Trappist monasteries have been brewing beer for centuries. They've been making cheese as well. Perhaps the best known Trappist beer and cheese are from the Scourmont abbey in southern Belgium -- can you say Chimay :-)
No, but you can visualize prion proteins within intact cell with a conventional electron microscopy. I kid you not. Here's an article with some really pretty pictures of prion proteins trafficking in cells.
Yes, his post is completely wrong. However, there have been advances in STM so that you can do STM with fixed organic samples now. Here's an example of a recent published study. Also atomic force microscopy (AFM) has become fairly common with fixed organic samples. I'm not calling you wrong - I'm just updating Slashdot readers to the state of the art in biological microscopy.
Your comment makes little sense. My lab does a lot of microscopy. B & L strictly make optical microscopes, which by the wavelengths of light, and properties of glass are restricted to resolve objects down to about 100 nanometers or so (at best - and we're talking with a really really good confocal or deconvolution microscope that runs about $500K). Mediocre electron microscopes visualize objects down to about 1000 angstroms. That's two orders of magnitude better, perhaps more if you have a good EM setup.
Lets see - it turns out that the Voynich manuscript is likely a bunch of drivel that pictures of naked women. Looks like we haven't come that far since it was written, as this Filipino edition of FHM would suggest!
Perhaps we had best think of the turbines and your house as a way of selecting for smarter birds. The ones that learn to avoid them contribute to the next generation.
Now, if only we could we could select for smarter environmentalists.
This wasn't on television, and may hurt some religious sensibilities, but I thought this Christmas ad for Ann Summers was very very clever. Possibly NSFW, depending on where you work.
If the virus is nothing but the DNA and a protein coating around it, why are the people wanting it to be live?
Am I missing something? What am I missing?
As a card-carrying virologist let me give you a run down on the information you're missing. If you don't consider the type of nucleic acid (RNA or DNA), there are two types of viruses that infect mammalian cells - enveloped and non-enveloped. Enveloped viruses (such as smallpox) have an outer lipid bilayer (the envelope) that is studded with glycoproteins that need to bind specific molecules on the surface of mammalian cells to permit fusion between the viral envelope and the cell membrane. Fusion allows the virus' nucleic acid to enter the cell. The viral envelope is very fragile, and breaks down rapidly when dried. When the envelope breaks down, it spills the contents of the virus out -- i.e. the nucleic acid, which in the absence of the envelope doesn't have a means to specifically enter a cell. This is one reason why wiping surfaces with 100% ethanol (a dehydrating agent) is quite effective against enveloped viruses like HIV.
Even viruses that are not enveloped have protein coats that directly interact with cell surface molecules that act as receptors to mediate the entry of these viruses into cells. The proteins that make up these coats also denature (lose their proper shape) with time, although this is typically a slower process.
Finally, how stable is the viral nucleic acid? Viral nucleic acids are typically not present as naked RNA or DNA, but in a complex of DNA or RNA with proteins that coat them. These coated nucleic acids are quite stable. Nucleic acid from DNA viruses (like smallpox) is likely to be more stable than nucleic acid from RNA viruses, and I'm guessing that they should be able to do phylogenetic studies on the strain of smallpox present in those scabs after amplifying recovered DNA by PCR.
BTW, after many years of Slashdot lurking, a wee bit of horn tooting. My lab works on how the genome of EBV latches on to human chromosomes. Here's a pretty picture from our work that was on the cover of the Journal of Virology last month.
I have a hard time believing that they can extract 10 ng of DNA from a fingerprint. A diploid human cell as 6x10e9 bp of DNA. One bp is 660 daltons. Calculating backward, 6x10e9 bp works out to being 6.6 pg of DNA.
So for them to extract 5-10 ng of DNA from a fingerprint, a fingerprint needs to contain between 1000 - 2000 cells. I work with epithelial cells, and a 1000 - 2000 cells is a fairly large patch of cells.
So either they mean that they get 10 ng of PCR amplified DNA (which is possible), but then is hardly representative of the entire genome, or they are using fingerprints from people who are really shedding skin!