obviously humans did not evolve from modern chimpanzees several million years ago, this would imply that no evolutionary progress (or evolution in general) befell the non-human branch of the tree, this is not a scientific paper, rather a school publication for public affairs: UGA Public Affairs Today this is just like reading in CNN that, well anything that CNN generally reports is incorrect in detail... but you get the picture:)
what's important with these types of news releases is the main idea, not the details, if you want details you'll have to read the journal publication...
i don't remember reading about much of the sort in high school, of course you very well could have attended HS more recently than i, or very very likely could have attended a school much better than mine, especially in the science department. but given the conservative nature of high school text driven, in no small part, by the boycotting nature of many 'christian-minded' institutions, i find the latter scenario more probable...
anyway, the idea of latent viruses remaining in the genome is a rather old idea, most notably for transposons (aka 'jumping genes') which seem to randomly re-arrange themselves within the genomes and 'jump' from one part of a DNA strand to another... also, more recently the idea of viruses actually serving an advantageous purpose for humans has been put forth with the finding of the importance of transposon-like activity in specific instances, such as the HyperVariable region in B-cells (FYI the hypervariable region is a piece of DNA which eventually codes for the binding region of antibodies, which is important for making them recognize foriegn antigens (which will be highly random by nature))... but the point of this paper being that they are/were a driving force for evolution, specifically the evolution of homo which is an interesting, and to the best of my knowledge, new idea.
Either these life forms would have some sort of natural protection from such radiation or have developed some technology that protects them. Or their life is based on something other than carbon (silicon?).
i find it amusing that since silicon is in the same family as carbon people point it out to be an element that life could arise from, forgetting that the multiple-bonding ability of C is unique to this element... Anyway most of the reason that gamma rays (and lots of high-energy photons) are dangerous to 99% of us wee little earth-dwelling creatures is because we have not evolved to prevent/repair this damage. if i bash apart a shitload of DNA in one of your pluripotent stem cells what will the cell do? - it's programed to undergo apoptosis (suicide), why?-because it's a (more or less) rare event that your cells acquire genetic damage (to that extent anyway) so it's more evolutionarily advantageous that the few cells that are damaged just die instead of spending the energy for every cell to continually have a plethora of genetic-repair proteins on the stand-by. if we were from a planet where a large percentage of our cells were being damaged continually then it would be more advantageous to have mechanisms by which to repair said damage...
there was a bacteria discovered a few years ago (this is off the top of my head mind you) that can survive up to 800 rads.
although it is true that gamma-ray bursts can evaporate an entire world's oceans, but so did meteors continually do so in the early years of dear old earth...
of course like the 'god arguement' no one can actually 'win' this arguement, but i just thought i could piss farther than you, heh:)
morphologically staph & strep are virtually indistinguishable, they are both gram positive cocci (circular) and are generally differentiated only by their colony morphology (they can also be differentiated by their lysing ability of RBC's, salt tolerability, celluar metabolism etc): strep grows in strings, staph in clusters (as their latin names would imply). but clinically they cause very different infections.
staph is mostly known for surgical infections, staph is the major cause of post-surgical infections and deaths in the US, particularly Staph. areus. oft you may hear of Methicillin-Resistant Staph. Areus (MRSA) in which vanco/zyvox are considered the only therapeutic alternatives (to nafcillin & broad-spectrum B-lactams), although there are always exceptions to the rule Staph is known primarily for wound-infections...
Strep. Streptococcus is the cause of some wound infections such as the infamous necrotizing fascitis ('flesh-eating bacteria'), but it is mostly known for pneumonia (henceforth the name 'strep pneumo'), and 'strep throat' (group B beta-hemolytic strep (if memory serves me correctly)).
there are generally more alternatives for treating strep than there are for staph, clinically. strep is more sensitive to almost all cephalosporins (or at least used to be), macrolides, and a plethora of other abx that staph is not.
(since i saw this on another post, but am too lazy to make another reply, i'll just add) contrary to some peoples' beliefs most of these infections do not resolve very well on their own, which is much the reason infectious disease was the #1 killer 100 years ago, but is near the bottom of the list today. sure strep throat might eventually be 'fought off' but your chances of phyelonephritis or glomereulonephritis (renal infection) are high enough that you'd probably opt for the abx instead of risking it. if you have a Staph. A infection chances are it's from getting knifed, operated on, or otherwise had your skin broken and your tissue innoculated with its resident bacteria. if this is the case you will _not_ get better by yourself, nor are your chances of 'fighting it off' good enough for anyone to expect you to survive. while it is shown that your body requires immune challenge to maintain its ability to ward off disease, you don't seem me opting for an Ebola innoculation to keep my immunity robust.
As long a huge percentage of the people in this world (mostly Americans and Canadians, I imagine)
since when does less than 5% of earth's population constitute a "huge percentage?" but all joking aside: 3rd world countries use a HUGE amount of antibiotics inappropriately, most major metropolitan arenas feature a plethora of street vendors selling antibiotics by the tablet, can we say 'inappropriate and subtherapeutic abx administration?' developing countries do not have the necessary barriers to entry for there to exist a system to properly & systematically screen for appropriate usage. not to mention the infeasibility of someone who pays 2-weeks worth of pay for 1 day's worth of treatment self-treating for the normal 7-14 days of standard therapy...
hell, look at the united states; over a billion abx 'scripts were written in the latter half of the 90's for the common cold, uh... does Amoxil kill rhinoviruses? - just think this, but on a magnitude 20+ times greater...
abx usage in agriculture is another story entirely, but of greater weight, especially considering its worldwide breadth.
point being that abx mis-use (or antibacterial misuse) is NOT an american/canadian problem, it is a global problem with the biggest contributors beyond the borders of biosphere I's first world countrys' borders...
it's amazing that this Zyvox/linezolid story made it to/. what about the vanco resistance cropping up for the past few years? if you think linezolid resistance is a bad bad thing, think about vancomycin, its usage, its mainstay, then imagine it wasn't there. i shudder to think about it...
granted, the linezolid-resistance is somewhat amazing, tho not unexpected, given the fact that it was supposed to be used only within the strictest of circumstances, but it's not as if institutions usually follow these sorts of guidelines, unless it costs$10,000+ like Xigris (drogecogen alpha (sp?))
That it took 3 weeks for SBC to install a simple "run-of-the-mill" phoneline in my apartment (hell - it was already installed - all they had to do was turn it on!) - I could see suing them.
and guess how many *minutes* it'll take them to disconnect your line?-i think it took qwest about 15 minutes when we disconnected & both got mobile phones: *call qwest* "i'd like to have my phone disconnected." "when would you like it disconnected?" "ASAP you commie bastards." "we'll have it disconnected by 5:00p" *look at watch 4:46* "uh... ok then."
we also waited over 2 weeks to get "hooked up"
we also waited 3 years for DSL (and moved 3 times) before getting a cablemodem...
But how lazy does that make us...we're now making robots to play our sports, teachers will eventually be dubbed out for computer interaction
you're missing the point, we're not trying to create robots so that worldcup players can take a break, they're building robots that can solve problems, and since it's an international effort they chose a dynamic medium (unlike chess et al.) that has global interest/understanding. making a robo-football (americano) would have about as much interest in the rest of the world as a robo-sumo would here in the states...
and as far as replacing teachers w/ computers, espcially jr. or sr. high teachers: how many students are already having their teachers be replaced by google? honestly there's more information online ready for consumption at your own pace (oft much faster than in a classroom setting) than any teacher could ever supply anyone with. true human interaction, blah blah blah, but face it, for people interested in learning technology will be a panacea.
sorry this is a bit off-topic, but isn't that the way discussions usually go?
so i saw a scientific american frontiers show on PBS quite a while ago, never cared much for the robocup stuff until i'd seen that, and now, man is it ever awesome to read about... ultimatedly i think this is a great way to make technology "fun," there's too much seperation of the mega-sports leagues vaguely reminescent of ancient gladitorial social-control and the arts & sciences...
but anyway: Can they pick themselves up if they stumble? Can they figure out whether another robot is on their team? Can they pass?
as of last year the 4-legged autonomous robots (there are different leagues: 2 & 4 legged autonomous, and 'wheeled boxes' of which the team is controlled by one computer and viewed by an omnipotent eye (above the playing field)) could pass to one another, recognize team vs. non-team (by color i believe, though unsure), and even 'squeaked' to one another to announce control of the ball if out of the line of sight of team-mates (ie behind them). at the time the SciAm show was aired the 2-legged league was mostly focusing on walking, but then again a couple of years ago the 4-legged league had robots that couldn't get up if knocked over, and oftentimes got 'confused' and would endlessly wander into a corner...
while world-cup is amazingly awesome (mostly in it's humanizingly unifiying potential) i think robocup could ultimately become a unifier of 'fun technlogy' with a world-wide audience. of course i could be dead wrong (which i usually am...).
just because something goes undiscovered for a long time does not mean that parallels can be justified between finding life on earth and in the great beyond. although i do believe that the universe must be teeming w/ life (stastically speaking), i wouldn't necessarily say that our lack of finding all the life on earth supports the idea that there is lots of life elsewhere, but we just suck at finding it...
Fuck you bitch! I shop at Wal-Mart and I'm no redneck!
you might be while you're at Wal-Mart. heh, i used to shop at White-trash-mart,.... but then i got better...
ok, i'm kidding, there are redneck's everywhere (especially here in Fargo-hot damn, summer in the city...) so IMHO Wal-Mart & reddneck are not mutually inclusive.
not that i know wtf i'm talking about 99% of the time
ok, so this arguement is absolutely outrageous. i agree that it's good to question authority/established_wisdom/et_al. *BUT* it would also be in the best interest of a government body to persue solutions to the AIDS problem based upon the most probable cause rather than use some bogus Duesemburg (sp?) hogwash to deny the problem & ostracize large groups of people.
whether HIV is a sole cause of AIDS or simply a hugely contributing factor it doesn't change the fact that AIDS cases may be drastically reduced by controlling HIV infection, even if the theory of HIV being the sole cause of AIDS is not correct if the solution involves reducing HIV transmission anyway what's the justification for stalling and wasting everybody's time with persuit of misplaced notions against the better judgement of the academic & public health communities?
here's an excerpt from your aliveandwell.org propaganda page, i'm no virologist, oncologist, nor epidemiologist, but i do know that this information is false:
Like most of our present AIDS experts, Gallo came from a group of government cancer scientists who had spent two decades and $22 billion seeking proof for the theory of a contagious, sexually transmitted cancer virus. Since retroviruses do not kill cells and cancer is a condition marked by rapid cell growth, this type of virus seemed a likely candidate for a cancer virus. But 20 years of research devoted to retroviruses failed to produce proof for the concept of contagious cancer.
Since 1984, most of these cancer experts and all $50 billion of AIDS research have focused exclusively on the theory of a retrovirus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS. Though Gallo and others claim that HIV causes AIDS by destroying the T cells of the immune system, 20 years of cancer research proved that retroviruses do not destroy cells.
Gallo's 'contageous sexually transmitted cancer virus' was not a retrovirus (retroviridae) it was in fact HPV (papovaviridae). the idea that a cell's genetic makeup needs to be altered by the virus to 'cause' cancer is unfounded. HPV, specifically strains 16, 18, & 32 'cause' cancer by coding for protiens which inhibit tumor suppressor genes (TSG), not by directly altering cellular DNA. such is the case with several human viruses, although most commonly known are HPV & EBV (epstien barr virus (the cause of mononucleosis) 'causes' Burketts Lymphoma & Nasopharengial Carcinoma), neither of which directly alter cellular DNA. other viruses known to be spread sexually which have strong association with cancer are hepatitis B & C viruses (HBV & HCV, hepadnaviridae & flaviviridae respectively), of which HBV is the only one to actually change cellular DNA (as it uses reverse transcriptase such as a retrovirus does) albeit not to the extent some retroviruses do. of the retroviruses the human t-cell lymphoma viruses (HTLV) are thought to cause some T-cell cancers & are probably transmitted sexually, but aren't thought to be oncogenic enough to grab public dollars...
oncology isn't an exact science, it's exceedingly difficult to find anything that directly causes it. do some reading & everything is stastical associations, don't you ever wonder why it took so long to 'prove' smoking caused lung cancer? i can give 1*10^6 fibroblasts the same dose of chemical X, if 90% of the cells become malignant within a few generations does chemical X cause cancer?-what about the 1*10^5 cells that didn't become malignant?
retroviruses can & do cause cancer. there just aren't any good human models for this conjecture, but animal models about. Rous Sarcoma Virus & Avian Leukemia Virus are both examples of retroviruses which cause cancer in animals.
but i degress, what would i know?-like i said, i'm no virologist, oncologist nor epidemiologist, not like the people at aliveandwell.org anyway. i'm sure they know more about molecular, cell & tumor biology than the entire established scientific community, and can also rightly disregard all the studies that have associated anything with anything else.
since when has pirating/stealing/copying/whatevering music been a real issue of cost? when Reznor or Nivek Ogre releases a new CD i don't give a flying fuck if it's $6.99 or $20.00; i will buy it, period. i can't put a price on art, sure i can justify why a specific piece/artist is worth something to me, intrinsically, but as far as an actual concrete value: good luck. not that price always correlates with quality i mean i can go to Barnes & Noble and buy Tolstoy's War and Peace in hardcover a lot cheaper than Opra's whatever new POS book is on the shelves, yet which will still actually be around in 100 years? but i degress... piont being this: the reason why people don't buy music but rather download it for free isn't generally because paying money for their music is too difficult, but because they hate the people selling it to them. Walk into Best Buy sometime, look around you. hundreds of idiots in polo shirts trying to pressure you into buying a 4th DVD player for the house, and selling IDE cables for $10.00. buy a CD and have less than $.50 (if they're lucky) of your $16.99 actually going back to the individuals whose music it should be, but no longer legally belongs to. how can anyone morally inclined support such an environment? Stealing is wrong, blah blah blah. you know what?-stealing is wrong, but so is extortion, monopolisation & abuse of power. is it more wrong for me to download the latest Britney Spears song to figure out why everyone hates her so much, than for the record companies to tell me i should pay stupid amounts of money to do so?-i doubt it.
the record companies, fuck 'em, they've had their day. if a different and non-totalitarian form of musical distribution comes to light so be it, if it doesn't work i'm sure some huge company would be glad to start new record companies in the future...
you can go ahead and buy your $16.99 CDs, i'll download every Gravity Kills song ever made, and mail the band $17.00, and they'll make about 8X what they would've if i'd purchased their 4 CDs.
personally i like physical media and therefore buy almost exclusively from used CD shops. it's, for now, the best i can do to acquire physical media while giving the least amount of support to the recording industry (especially when i buy the 'demo only' CDs). it's unfortunate that i am also not supporting the Bands who make the music, but that's just the way it is for now..
They want free music
i don't care about 'free'-i care about where the money's going...
it's interesting to note that this story is entirely from the perspective of a capitalist & democratic society (oft accused (rightly so) of being run by 'elitest technocrats') on its own moral high-ground of assuming an 'information free' culture already exists in its native province (UK). however, with the case of America, perhaps the most blatantly in-your-face with claims of informational freedom, recent studies have shown that a vast majority of internet traffic is centered upon only a few news carriers (yahoo! MSN AOL), and it is well known that the vast majority of our other physical media is controlled solely by but a few companies (TW/AOL, Disney et al). is _this_ freedom? while individuals everywhere will always have oppertunity to express disfavor with whatever it is they feel like, the internet only provides an expanded environment in which to do so, nothing more. a group of individuals discussing politics in a chat-room are no less subordinate to a hostile government in the end, than are the same individuals sitting in a dining room discussion over supper. the globalisation of information is an inevidable progression the information age must allow, yet this in no way assures the integrity of said information, nor its effect on greater society. i live in a proclaimedly expression-embracing country (USA)but my sources of information are undoubtably shaped by the dearth of non-partial reporting in my media-monopoly. more importantly in either society we still engage in 'majority rule' whether the majority is in a republic or communism the sources of information available to *most* people will still dictate the whims of the country. While i _do_ think that it's absolutely wonderful that the Chinese people are recieving more online liberty it should be remembered that until an enormous percentage of people are online & engaging in news-gathering & discussion government-run news agencies will still have a firm control over public belief (56M out of 1.xxB is not a very large percentage).
the next logical step is to prevent networks from airing the News until at least 9PM
you forget that *99%* of the news in this country is provided via 2 huge corporations (excluding internet news, which bumps it up to like 3). they will never be censored, they *own* too many people *we* vote into positions of power...
This will just cause an underground ring to develop for video games. You could even start having games, or mods for games, being developped by people that are only released in an underground.
of course the unspoken part of this statement infects the death of quake mods (q3f, urban terror, et al) shareware/freeware games such as druglord et al. and all of their ilk, as organized groups making these mods could be easily targeted and prosecuted. how do you think extridition treaties would work in this respect?
makes you feel 'patriotic' or something doesn't it?
good luck getting any sort of decent MD in 6 years, you're looking at 7 just to be an internest, twice that if you want to be any sort of specialst (nephrologist, cardiologist, oncologist, ob/gyn, et al.) anyway this is beside the point...
There are commercial software applications that are going to be used in life threatening applications. Medical software is a growing industry. As soon as someone dies as a result of your medical software, or even when a doctor was using it, expect a lawsuit. The standard threats of legality and fear of punishment are the motivators when writing software for that kind of industry. Therefore, in the commercial world, it is (in the most part, and especially in code with a more serious use than KaZaA) self regulating.
i work in a hospital, i use hospital software every day, it's an IT environment that would make anyone cry who 'gets it:' buggy-as-hell software that does not catch Rx interactions, let alone disease-state/Rx interactions. our particular institution utilizes an amalgam of 3 totally seperate software venders for our needs, which basically means nothing's compatitible with anything else as they are all using micro$oftian 'incompatibility' tactics to pressure their clients into using 100% of the services offered by their specific vendor... we were recently looking at purchasing an (obscenely expensive POS) system/protocol to track individual Rx dosages given to patients @ bedside utilizing a system of barcodes and HUGE amounts of tracking & logging, and the system wasn't even capible of catching duplicate therapy. for example you're a patient at our institution and recieve 2mg of morphine in a 1mL syringe for pain, which the MD has written for you to recieve 2-8mg every 4-6 hours as needed, 1 minute after recieving your morphine a different nurse grabs a morphine 8mg/1mL syringe and gives that to you... this system would not recognize that you'd just recieved morphine as it thinks they're two seperate drugs, although they're really only 2 different concentrations. if these 'state of the art' and 'cutting edge' systems can't even figure out when someone's getting 2 doses of the exact same drug are you going to expect them to notice if you're getting Darvon, Demerol, Oxycontin, Hydrocodone, Codeine, et al. which will potentiate the effects of your morphine? and dream on if it catches non-opiate synergistic agents like Versed, Luminal, or any of the 10 billion other drugs which cause CNS suppression.
point being this: have med errors occured as a result of out software?-undoubtably, yes. have deaths occured?-probably not. but will our software vendors ever be held accountable for providing shitty service?-no. why?-because we already sign disclaimers absolving them from litigation. additionally it is the ultimate responsibility of hospital employees to prevent deleterous errors, and no jury today would shift the blame...
why do we use these services? because, like any bass-ackwards corporation: the people utalizing the software are not the people buying it, which provides for little if any direct financial incentive for these companies to improve ther products. all and all if there's self-regulation in this facet of software design i have yet to see it. but if the individuals whom work for these companies would refuse to allow their mega-patched bloatware packages to reach the market things would be 1000x better on my end.
one does not die from the bends, he/she dies because he/she blacks out and is underwater (ie. people don't breathe water). bends is the bane of 'freewater divers' (divers that like to hold their breaths), AFAIK it is not the bane of scuba divers and their oxigenated ilk.
actually almost 30 years pass in the shire alone, the story starts out with bilbo's 111th b-day and froto's 33rd??? (correct me if i'm wrong) and he doesn't leave the shire until he's of age (55). as the story commenses they spend months in wilderness and weeks in cities/towns. the condensation of the timeline is one of the things which bothers me most about FOtR in movie form, in addition to the shift in viewer perspective robbing the story of much the sense of mystery and marvel so characteristic of the book..
i know this is offtopic, but it's just so damn important i couldn't let it go...;p
Dave Berry also pointed out in a newspaper clipping that there was no one left living in North Dakota, well i usually see at least 2 or 3 people every day wandering about on this side of the border (not including myself), so take his arguements with a grain or salt...
contrary to popular opinion sharks do get cancer, and actually almost all living things do, truthfully we know very little about sharks, so it's no small wonder that misplaced ideas about their biology exist. AFAIK all animals will contain cells capible of becoming cancerous, the very nature of the way our bodies are constructed more or less assures this, if we exposed a shark to enough mutagen chances are some of the cells will sustain damage to tumor-suppressors or other vital genes regulating cellular proliferation, and thus will acquire cancer... this is now an "old" story, so i dunno if you'll read this or not, but what the hell?
IMHO, a sort of "soul," or part of humans which sets us apart from animals would be our sentience i don't think imparting human cell parts would also impart this "soul" into any animal incapible of pondering its own existence. we've been whipping human genes into mice for probably longer than you realize and thus far no one (that wasn't a crackpot) has put forth the idea that engineered mice have human "souls."
there's nothing wrong with the idea of combining human genes with other life forms, nor throwing desirable genes from other sources into ourselves. it's a perfectly natural thing, it's not like each species is in 100% isolation of one another, bacteria have swapped genes with other bacterial species for epochs, many viruses "grab" genes from their hosts and then "put" them into new hosts (which is why many retroviruses cause cancer), tomatos with fish genes in them to survive the frost are still tomatos (although they taste like fish and henceforth are no longer on the market), staph with an R plasmid for gent acquired from strep is still staph, and pigs with HLA instead of SLA (Human Lymphocyte Antigen & Swine... , respectively what lymphocytes use to "see" other cells and determine self vs non-self) are still pigs. it's this sort of biggoted ignorance and anthropocentric thinking which leads to religion and "morality" standing in the way of actual social contributions of science. biotech is a step forward, and if you don't think so then you might as well reject all technology which religious zealots decried when first implimented in the name of morality or "playing god..." birth control giving us control of life or death?-how about antibiotics: let nature run it's cource, god'll clear up that pseudomonas pneumonia no problemo if he's "meant" to live... like the above absurd statement most religiously based statements about "playing god," or whathaveyouwhatnot have little if any socially redeeming qualities, rather they are bound by tradition and outdated dogma, as a humanist i see these arguements as groundless in the face of what these technologies may potentially bring to our species, and as an atheist i find the "moral delema" pathetically humorous.
Slashdot Mirror
what's important with these types of news releases is the main idea, not the details, if you want details you'll have to read the journal publication...
-tid242
anyway, the idea of latent viruses remaining in the genome is a rather old idea, most notably for transposons (aka 'jumping genes') which seem to randomly re-arrange themselves within the genomes and 'jump' from one part of a DNA strand to another... also, more recently the idea of viruses actually serving an advantageous purpose for humans has been put forth with the finding of the importance of transposon-like activity in specific instances, such as the HyperVariable region in B-cells (FYI the hypervariable region is a piece of DNA which eventually codes for the binding region of antibodies, which is important for making them recognize foriegn antigens (which will be highly random by nature))... but the point of this paper being that they are/were a driving force for evolution, specifically the evolution of homo which is an interesting, and to the best of my knowledge, new idea.
-tid242
i find it amusing that since silicon is in the same family as carbon people point it out to be an element that life could arise from, forgetting that the multiple-bonding ability of C is unique to this element... Anyway most of the reason that gamma rays (and lots of high-energy photons) are dangerous to 99% of us wee little earth-dwelling creatures is because we have not evolved to prevent/repair this damage. if i bash apart a shitload of DNA in one of your pluripotent stem cells what will the cell do? - it's programed to undergo apoptosis (suicide), why?-because it's a (more or less) rare event that your cells acquire genetic damage (to that extent anyway) so it's more evolutionarily advantageous that the few cells that are damaged just die instead of spending the energy for every cell to continually have a plethora of genetic-repair proteins on the stand-by. if we were from a planet where a large percentage of our cells were being damaged continually then it would be more advantageous to have mechanisms by which to repair said damage...
there was a bacteria discovered a few years ago (this is off the top of my head mind you) that can survive up to 800 rads.
although it is true that gamma-ray bursts can evaporate an entire world's oceans, but so did meteors continually do so in the early years of dear old earth...
of course like the 'god arguement' no one can actually 'win' this arguement, but i just thought i could piss farther than you, heh :)
-tid242
staph is mostly known for surgical infections, staph is the major cause of post-surgical infections and deaths in the US, particularly Staph. areus. oft you may hear of Methicillin-Resistant Staph. Areus (MRSA) in which vanco/zyvox are considered the only therapeutic alternatives (to nafcillin & broad-spectrum B-lactams), although there are always exceptions to the rule Staph is known primarily for wound-infections...
Strep. Streptococcus is the cause of some wound infections such as the infamous necrotizing fascitis ('flesh-eating bacteria'), but it is mostly known for pneumonia (henceforth the name 'strep pneumo'), and 'strep throat' (group B beta-hemolytic strep (if memory serves me correctly)).
there are generally more alternatives for treating strep than there are for staph, clinically. strep is more sensitive to almost all cephalosporins (or at least used to be), macrolides, and a plethora of other abx that staph is not.
(since i saw this on another post, but am too lazy to make another reply, i'll just add) contrary to some peoples' beliefs most of these infections do not resolve very well on their own, which is much the reason infectious disease was the #1 killer 100 years ago, but is near the bottom of the list today. sure strep throat might eventually be 'fought off' but your chances of phyelonephritis or glomereulonephritis (renal infection) are high enough that you'd probably opt for the abx instead of risking it. if you have a Staph. A infection chances are it's from getting knifed, operated on, or otherwise had your skin broken and your tissue innoculated with its resident bacteria. if this is the case you will _not_ get better by yourself, nor are your chances of 'fighting it off' good enough for anyone to expect you to survive. while it is shown that your body requires immune challenge to maintain its ability to ward off disease, you don't seem me opting for an Ebola innoculation to keep my immunity robust.
-tid242
since when does less than 5% of earth's population constitute a "huge percentage?" but all joking aside: 3rd world countries use a HUGE amount of antibiotics inappropriately, most major metropolitan arenas feature a plethora of street vendors selling antibiotics by the tablet, can we say 'inappropriate and subtherapeutic abx administration?' developing countries do not have the necessary barriers to entry for there to exist a system to properly & systematically screen for appropriate usage. not to mention the infeasibility of someone who pays 2-weeks worth of pay for 1 day's worth of treatment self-treating for the normal 7-14 days of standard therapy...
hell, look at the united states; over a billion abx 'scripts were written in the latter half of the 90's for the common cold, uh... does Amoxil kill rhinoviruses? - just think this, but on a magnitude 20+ times greater...
abx usage in agriculture is another story entirely, but of greater weight, especially considering its worldwide breadth.
point being that abx mis-use (or antibacterial misuse) is NOT an american/canadian problem, it is a global problem with the biggest contributors beyond the borders of biosphere I's first world countrys' borders...
it's amazing that this Zyvox/linezolid story made it to /. what about the vanco resistance cropping up for the past few years? if you think linezolid resistance is a bad bad thing, think about vancomycin, its usage, its mainstay, then imagine it wasn't there. i shudder to think about it...
granted, the linezolid-resistance is somewhat amazing, tho not unexpected, given the fact that it was supposed to be used only within the strictest of circumstances, but it's not as if institutions usually follow these sorts of guidelines, unless it costs$10,000+ like Xigris (drogecogen alpha (sp?))
-tid242
and guess how many *minutes* it'll take them to disconnect your line?-i think it took qwest about 15 minutes when we disconnected & both got mobile phones: *call qwest* "i'd like to have my phone disconnected." "when would you like it disconnected?" "ASAP you commie bastards." "we'll have it disconnected by 5:00p" *look at watch 4:46* "uh... ok then."
we also waited over 2 weeks to get "hooked up"
we also waited 3 years for DSL (and moved 3 times) before getting a cablemodem...
-tid242
you're missing the point, we're not trying to create robots so that worldcup players can take a break, they're building robots that can solve problems, and since it's an international effort they chose a dynamic medium (unlike chess et al.) that has global interest/understanding. making a robo-football (americano) would have about as much interest in the rest of the world as a robo-sumo would here in the states...
and as far as replacing teachers w/ computers, espcially jr. or sr. high teachers: how many students are already having their teachers be replaced by google? honestly there's more information online ready for consumption at your own pace (oft much faster than in a classroom setting) than any teacher could ever supply anyone with. true human interaction, blah blah blah, but face it, for people interested in learning technology will be a panacea.
sorry this is a bit off-topic, but isn't that the way discussions usually go?
-tid242
but anyway:
Can they pick themselves up if they stumble? Can they figure out whether another robot is on their team? Can they pass?
as of last year the 4-legged autonomous robots (there are different leagues: 2 & 4 legged autonomous, and 'wheeled boxes' of which the team is controlled by one computer and viewed by an omnipotent eye (above the playing field)) could pass to one another, recognize team vs. non-team (by color i believe, though unsure), and even 'squeaked' to one another to announce control of the ball if out of the line of sight of team-mates (ie behind them). at the time the SciAm show was aired the 2-legged league was mostly focusing on walking, but then again a couple of years ago the 4-legged league had robots that couldn't get up if knocked over, and oftentimes got 'confused' and would endlessly wander into a corner...
while world-cup is amazingly awesome (mostly in it's humanizingly unifiying potential) i think robocup could ultimately become a unifier of 'fun technlogy' with a world-wide audience. of course i could be dead wrong (which i usually am...).
my $2*10^(-2)
-tid242
-tid242
you might be while you're at Wal-Mart. heh, i used to shop at White-trash-mart,.... but then i got better...
ok, i'm kidding, there are redneck's everywhere (especially here in Fargo-hot damn, summer in the city...) so IMHO Wal-Mart & reddneck are not mutually inclusive.
not that i know wtf i'm talking about 99% of the time
-tid242
they'd better put the 'Redneck' language option back into their distro's, ever since RH rm'd it things just haven't been the same around here *sigh*..
-tid242
damn i need a better sig :(
whether HIV is a sole cause of AIDS or simply a hugely contributing factor it doesn't change the fact that AIDS cases may be drastically reduced by controlling HIV infection, even if the theory of HIV being the sole cause of AIDS is not correct if the solution involves reducing HIV transmission anyway what's the justification for stalling and wasting everybody's time with persuit of misplaced notions against the better judgement of the academic & public health communities?
here's an excerpt from your aliveandwell.org propaganda page, i'm no virologist, oncologist, nor epidemiologist, but i do know that this information is false:
Like most of our present AIDS experts, Gallo came from a group of government cancer scientists who had spent two decades and $22 billion seeking proof for the theory of a contagious, sexually transmitted cancer virus. Since retroviruses do not kill cells and cancer is a condition marked by rapid cell growth, this type of virus seemed a likely candidate for a cancer virus. But 20 years of research devoted to retroviruses failed to produce proof for the concept of contagious cancer.
Since 1984, most of these cancer experts and all $50 billion of AIDS research have focused exclusively on the theory of a retrovirus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS. Though Gallo and others claim that HIV causes AIDS by destroying the T cells of the immune system, 20 years of cancer research proved that retroviruses do not destroy cells.
Gallo's 'contageous sexually transmitted cancer virus' was not a retrovirus (retroviridae) it was in fact HPV (papovaviridae). the idea that a cell's genetic makeup needs to be altered by the virus to 'cause' cancer is unfounded. HPV, specifically strains 16, 18, & 32 'cause' cancer by coding for protiens which inhibit tumor suppressor genes (TSG), not by directly altering cellular DNA. such is the case with several human viruses, although most commonly known are HPV & EBV (epstien barr virus (the cause of mononucleosis) 'causes' Burketts Lymphoma & Nasopharengial Carcinoma), neither of which directly alter cellular DNA. other viruses known to be spread sexually which have strong association with cancer are hepatitis B & C viruses (HBV & HCV, hepadnaviridae & flaviviridae respectively), of which HBV is the only one to actually change cellular DNA (as it uses reverse transcriptase such as a retrovirus does) albeit not to the extent some retroviruses do. of the retroviruses the human t-cell lymphoma viruses (HTLV) are thought to cause some T-cell cancers & are probably transmitted sexually, but aren't thought to be oncogenic enough to grab public dollars...
oncology isn't an exact science, it's exceedingly difficult to find anything that directly causes it. do some reading & everything is stastical associations, don't you ever wonder why it took so long to 'prove' smoking caused lung cancer? i can give 1*10^6 fibroblasts the same dose of chemical X, if 90% of the cells become malignant within a few generations does chemical X cause cancer?-what about the 1*10^5 cells that didn't become malignant?
retroviruses can & do cause cancer. there just aren't any good human models for this conjecture, but animal models about. Rous Sarcoma Virus & Avian Leukemia Virus are both examples of retroviruses which cause cancer in animals.
but i degress, what would i know?-like i said, i'm no virologist, oncologist nor epidemiologist, not like the people at aliveandwell.org anyway. i'm sure they know more about molecular, cell & tumor biology than the entire established scientific community, and can also rightly disregard all the studies that have associated anything with anything else.
-tid242
remember liquid-audio-wtfs?
-tid242
the record companies, fuck 'em, they've had their day. if a different and non-totalitarian form of musical distribution comes to light so be it, if it doesn't work i'm sure some huge company would be glad to start new record companies in the future...
you can go ahead and buy your $16.99 CDs, i'll download every Gravity Kills song ever made, and mail the band $17.00, and they'll make about 8X what they would've if i'd purchased their 4 CDs.
personally i like physical media and therefore buy almost exclusively from used CD shops. it's, for now, the best i can do to acquire physical media while giving the least amount of support to the recording industry (especially when i buy the 'demo only' CDs). it's unfortunate that i am also not supporting the Bands who make the music, but that's just the way it is for now..
They want free music
i don't care about 'free'-i care about where the money's going...
-tid242
sorry this got long (and scatterbrained)
-tid242
you forget that *99%* of the news in this country is provided via 2 huge corporations (excluding internet news, which bumps it up to like 3). they will never be censored, they *own* too many people *we* vote into positions of power...
-tid242
This will just cause an underground ring to develop for video games. You could even start having games, or mods for games, being developped by people that are only released in an underground.
of course the unspoken part of this statement infects the death of quake mods (q3f, urban terror, et al) shareware/freeware games such as druglord et al. and all of their ilk, as organized groups making these mods could be easily targeted and prosecuted. how do you think extridition treaties would work in this respect?
makes you feel 'patriotic' or something doesn't it?
-tid242
There are commercial software applications that are going to be used in life threatening applications. Medical software is a growing industry. As soon as someone dies as a result of your medical software, or even when a doctor was using it, expect a lawsuit. The standard threats of legality and fear of punishment are the motivators when writing software for that kind of industry. Therefore, in the commercial world, it is (in the most part, and especially in code with a more serious use than KaZaA) self regulating.
i work in a hospital, i use hospital software every day, it's an IT environment that would make anyone cry who 'gets it:' buggy-as-hell software that does not catch Rx interactions, let alone disease-state/Rx interactions. our particular institution utilizes an amalgam of 3 totally seperate software venders for our needs, which basically means nothing's compatitible with anything else as they are all using micro$oftian 'incompatibility' tactics to pressure their clients into using 100% of the services offered by their specific vendor... we were recently looking at purchasing an (obscenely expensive POS) system/protocol to track individual Rx dosages given to patients @ bedside utilizing a system of barcodes and HUGE amounts of tracking & logging, and the system wasn't even capible of catching duplicate therapy. for example you're a patient at our institution and recieve 2mg of morphine in a 1mL syringe for pain, which the MD has written for you to recieve 2-8mg every 4-6 hours as needed, 1 minute after recieving your morphine a different nurse grabs a morphine 8mg/1mL syringe and gives that to you... this system would not recognize that you'd just recieved morphine as it thinks they're two seperate drugs, although they're really only 2 different concentrations. if these 'state of the art' and 'cutting edge' systems can't even figure out when someone's getting 2 doses of the exact same drug are you going to expect them to notice if you're getting Darvon, Demerol, Oxycontin, Hydrocodone, Codeine, et al. which will potentiate the effects of your morphine? and dream on if it catches non-opiate synergistic agents like Versed, Luminal, or any of the 10 billion other drugs which cause CNS suppression.
point being this: have med errors occured as a result of out software?-undoubtably, yes. have deaths occured?-probably not. but will our software vendors ever be held accountable for providing shitty service?-no. why?-because we already sign disclaimers absolving them from litigation. additionally it is the ultimate responsibility of hospital employees to prevent deleterous errors, and no jury today would shift the blame...
why do we use these services? because, like any bass-ackwards corporation: the people utalizing the software are not the people buying it, which provides for little if any direct financial incentive for these companies to improve ther products. all and all if there's self-regulation in this facet of software design i have yet to see it. but if the individuals whom work for these companies would refuse to allow their mega-patched bloatware packages to reach the market things would be 1000x better on my end.
just my 2*10^(-2)
-tid242
-tid242
well duh if it were regulated it'd be harder for corporations to use in various $$$-making schemes.
-tid242
actually almost 30 years pass in the shire alone, the story starts out with bilbo's 111th b-day and froto's 33rd??? (correct me if i'm wrong) and he doesn't leave the shire until he's of age (55). as the story commenses they spend months in wilderness and weeks in cities/towns. the condensation of the timeline is one of the things which bothers me most about FOtR in movie form, in addition to the shift in viewer perspective robbing the story of much the sense of mystery and marvel so characteristic of the book..
i know this is offtopic, but it's just so damn important i couldn't let it go... ;p
-tid242
-tid242
Dave Berry also pointed out in a newspaper clipping that there was no one left living in North Dakota, well i usually see at least 2 or 3 people every day wandering about on this side of the border (not including myself), so take his arguements with a grain or salt...
contrary to popular opinion sharks do get cancer, and actually almost all living things do, truthfully we know very little about sharks, so it's no small wonder that misplaced ideas about their biology exist. AFAIK all animals will contain cells capible of becoming cancerous, the very nature of the way our bodies are constructed more or less assures this, if we exposed a shark to enough mutagen chances are some of the cells will sustain damage to tumor-suppressors or other vital genes regulating cellular proliferation, and thus will acquire cancer... this is now an "old" story, so i dunno if you'll read this or not, but what the hell?
IMHO, a sort of "soul," or part of humans which sets us apart from animals would be our sentience i don't think imparting human cell parts would also impart this "soul" into any animal incapible of pondering its own existence. we've been whipping human genes into mice for probably longer than you realize and thus far no one (that wasn't a crackpot) has put forth the idea that engineered mice have human "souls."
... , respectively what lymphocytes use to "see" other cells and determine self vs non-self) are still pigs. it's this sort of biggoted ignorance and anthropocentric thinking which leads to religion and "morality" standing in the way of actual social contributions of science. biotech is a step forward, and if you don't think so then you might as well reject all technology which religious zealots decried when first implimented in the name of morality or "playing god..." birth control giving us control of life or death?-how about antibiotics: let nature run it's cource, god'll clear up that pseudomonas pneumonia no problemo if he's "meant" to live... like the above absurd statement most religiously based statements about "playing god," or whathaveyouwhatnot have little if any socially redeeming qualities, rather they are bound by tradition and outdated dogma, as a humanist i see these arguements as groundless in the face of what these technologies may potentially bring to our species, and as an atheist i find the "moral delema" pathetically humorous.
there's nothing wrong with the idea of combining human genes with other life forms, nor throwing desirable genes from other sources into ourselves. it's a perfectly natural thing, it's not like each species is in 100% isolation of one another, bacteria have swapped genes with other bacterial species for epochs, many viruses "grab" genes from their hosts and then "put" them into new hosts (which is why many retroviruses cause cancer), tomatos with fish genes in them to survive the frost are still tomatos (although they taste like fish and henceforth are no longer on the market), staph with an R plasmid for gent acquired from strep is still staph, and pigs with HLA instead of SLA (Human Lymphocyte Antigen & Swine