Mod this up. It is amazing what a bit of research will reveal. No doubt for common tasks the keyboard is faster, but it quickly breaks down. For the example in the original article of File-Open, while the alt-f-o might be quick (or command-o on a mac), you still will have the problem of selecting the file you want, which will almost certainly be faster with the mouse. I actually find that when using the mac terminal, if I need to open a file not in my current directory, it is almost always faster for me to find a file in the finder and drag it to the terminal window (which conveniently pastes in the full path) than to navigate to the file by keyboard/tab completion. YMMV, but remember that YM is not always the same as YPM (your perceived mileage).
Oh, now you put me on the spot... most of the refs I have are pretty technical; I am not sure there has been a good lay summary of the current work. Things have really taken off in the past 10 years now that good simulations are possible, and that DNA sequences are becoming much more common. Many of the interesting situations are not solvable analytically, so we have really only recently begun real investigation of what the effects of various scenarios are.
Most good evolution texts will have a section on Kimura's Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, which is the basis for most of the current thinking in molecular evolution. That said, it forms more of a null hypothesis than a working theory.
In any case, I have completely neglected to give you real references, and that is mostly because I want to give you things that are at an appropriate level for you. Let me know what your background is, and whether you have access to a good library, or if I should try to find things that are freely available on the web...
My email address is my user name at mac.com
Ugh... this is why evolutionary biology is so misunderstood. Natural selection is not as good as most people think, which is why all these arguments about how things can't have happened by chance are silly. There is an absurd amount of evidence that a large amount of evolution is non-adaptive. If anyone wants references, reply, and I will dive into my reference database. I won't bore the rest of you.
With respect to the specific case here, we will do a bit of common sense for ourselves: imagine a gene that has no effect when heterozygous but is lethal when homozygous. Now when that gene is common, there will be a good number of homozygotes to kill off through selection. Great. But now imagine that it is at low frequency, say 1/1,000. Then the homozygotes will be only at a frequency of 1/1,000,000... So roughly 2 copies of the lethal gene will be eliminated each generation in a population of a million, while there are still 998 copies floating around the population. It will take a very long time to completely eliminate the gene from the population. Random effects will speed up the loss in most cases (and to be clear, most of the time the gene won't even get to the low frequency I hypothesized), but at the same time those random effects can keep the gene around much longer than you would expect in a deterministic case.
Finally, I would also like to point out that this is all a very active area of research. The precise effects of different kinds of selection and random drift under different situations (subdivided populations, bottlenecks, population growth, etc) are still only somewhat known. We are learning a lot, but it takes a lot of time/effort. Common sense is rarely very informative. (Hence the big iron over at the Sanger center that was mentioned a few articles back)
While this might be neat because it integrates with Google, the concept is not at all new. When I was shopping for condos in Chicago a few years ago, I looked at the Citizen ICAM site (forgive the slashdotting...), which actually has a somewhat better interface for search, in my opinion. It may not look as slick as google, but it does allow you to look over a range of dates, and the map icons identify the type of crime.
It let me see that one prospective condo was right in a corner of fairly low crime, bordered by much higher crime. I could have guessed that visiting the neighborhood, but it was nice to see somewhat empirically.
Of course academians know of Chicago, but I would disagree that they think it is synanmous(sic) with quality. My colleagues and I just think of it as another college, ditto for anyone in the top echelons of the corporate world.
Personally, I have come to regard all colleges as "just another college" and I am much more likely to look at the individual regardless of where they went to school. Anyone who thinks that the work someone did in high school that got them into college is a strong indicator of potential 20 years down the line has some real disappointments coming.
The other (final?) point is that to look at Chicago as a "college" is really missing the boat. The graduate population dwarfs the undergraduate, and since we were originally talking about a grad student's research, that was where my comments were focussed.
Chicago is not Harvard. Harvard is not Oxford. And none of them are the University of Kansas. I can make trivial statements too!
I think there are many who would disagree with your comment on the Nobel. It think it is pretty hard to argue that a prize that goes to one group once a year is being given out like candy. Usually that implies that there are many out there. Given out like the lottery would be fair statement, but I would still guess that many would disagree.
Now as to this idea that most people haven't heard of Chicago: I do not disagree at all. However, to claim that what the hoi polloi know is a good measure of quality is pretty weak. People at top levels of academia, buisiness, law, medicine, etc. all know about the University of Chicago, and it is highly respected there. I think you might be confusing US News with a measure of quality.
I want to be quite clear here. I am not arguing that Harvard is not the best school in the country. It may well be, and graduates of it always seem quite determined to self-validate by making a big point of such rankings. However, to suggest that any school consistently in the top 20 is "hardly a significant player" is an untenable position.
BTW, what are oppritunities? Because if that is what Harvard is giving out, I don't think I want them.
Yup, they pale. That is why they have the most Nobel laureates of any school. Outside of academia, Stanford and Harvard may get more play, but trust me, Chicago is pretty far up there in terms of real quality.
That would be a possibility, but two things make it unlikely (from the actual Nature article, which I can read, being at a University with a subscription): One is that if it were just a region of high mutation, then you would expect to see other changes in the gene. They don't find them. The other thing is that they have this behavior at 11 sites in the gene. So it is not as if there is one site that is flipping around all the time. There is something strange going on. I don't really have a good sense of what it is, and the RNA backup hypothesis will be pretty easy to check. I expect there will be a lot of work on this in the next few years, and we should have some answers soon enough.
Ugh. And now cars with CD players are a pain in the ass to use with ipods. I am back in the time when I had to use a radio transmitter to play tapes in the car. Why they don't just add a minijack as a standard feature on car radios these days is beyond me.
Yup. You might remember watching one of the auxiliary WTC buildings (#6 maybe, I don't remember) collapse the afternoon of Sept 11. The one that happened to hold all of Smith Barney's main offices. With the money I had invested with them, I was a bit worried that things would get seriously screwed up. But talking to an employee I found out that they had built a full backup facility for Y2K over in NJ, and they just moved all the employees over there (they were lucky enough not to lose anyone, if I remember correctly, as they were not in the main towers) and got back to work.
Now don't ask me why Y2K required building a backup facility (fears of NYC apocalypse, maybe, which would be sadly ironic) but it turned out to be a good idea. And clearly there was some benefit to all of the other upgrades that were undertaken at the same time ("while we are spending all this money, why don't we...").
Well, the robot is actually going to be doing a chunk of the building of the elevator. Once the first strand is up, the robot's first job will be to bring more and more strands up until the whole shebang can support some real weight. I would say the real showstopper is probably getting the carbon nanotubes long enough and strong enough. They wil certainly have plenty of time to get the robot tuned before that is ready.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say organisms. You know:trees, bacteria, viruses, birds, cats... I could go on. Come to think of it, it might even be a pretty good way to design humans!
The gene does not cause infertility, just maleness. So it can spread. Which is in fact what they want; They can't very well introduce the gene into all of the fish out there (if they could, they would have just killed them all) so what they want to do is introduce this gene, then as it spreads, gradually the proportion of males in the population will increase. When you have all males, then the population dies.
There are, of course, problems with this approach. One is the potential for accidental spread, both to other populations of carp outside Australia, and to other species.* Another is that the females who are left are likely to produce more surviving offspring (population limits in fish are not usually from the number of eggs produced). Another is that it will take a while to have huge effects, during which time mutations might arise that block this mechanism and allow female development. Such a mutation would spread rapidly (it would be highly favored by selection once the population got far off 50-50) so you would be back a square one.
Biocontrol of introduced species is notoriously bad, particularly in Australia. See Cane Toads. We are exceptionally bad at foreseeing all of the downstream consequences of such manipulations of the ecosystem. A cool idea, and some great work by the scientists, but lets hope that they think long and hard before releasing these fish into the wild.
*do you really think that all those extra male carp will ignore the chance for some kinky inter-species romance? It just takes one...
More like "Wow, what a stupid set of 'benchmarks'! Nice to know that an app that no one uses on a mac (Premiere) and one developed by MS (that no one needs too much speed for) run slower on a Mac. But look, the app that people actually use (Photoshop) actually does better on the Mac."
I'll keep waiting for a benchmark that is trustworthy. Until then, I'll use the computer that lets me do the work I need to do most efficiently. Turns out that is a Mac. It may happen to be the fastest computer as well, but we are still waiting for a good test.
Well there it is! If it requires our intelligence to make some bits of dna play tic-tac-toe, clearly there was a creator that made it do something as complicated as make us.
I may as well give up my work toward a PhD evolutionary biology right now. Damn scientists proving the existence of God... excuse me, that's "intelligent designer".
Just reread my post, and though no one on slashdot will care one whit, I must correct my grammar. It shoudl read: "they will not look like morons." Not "they will not look like a moron." I suppose I could have said, "it will not look like a moron," but somehow, referring to a corporation as a moron seems odd, no matter how often its logo tries to anthropomorphize.
IANAL either, but my brother is, and I think that you have 1 year from public annoucement to patent an idea. So they would not look like a moron at all.
IBM is something of a different beast, seeing as they produce hardware. Innovations in manufacturing and such are much easier to justify to managers than advances in pure math. The really sad fact is that there have been few great advances in software at all since the gui (if you agree that that was an advance).
Re:Microsoft Research?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The sad thing is, MS has long had a good research department. They hire very bright people and pay them a lot. But bright people with great ideas and great research doesn't mean that any of that good stuff will ever make it into production code. Marketing drones and codemonkeys do a good job of stopping that. If only people would listen to the real eggheads.
Ah for Plato's republic of philosopher kings... of course, it didn't really work out on the Simpsons...
You'd think that a robot like this would have an easy time flying. I mean, all you have to do is leave out the bit where you program it to know about falling, right?
And why hasn't anyone noticed this obvious grammar mistake? It should read: this *affects* all of our competitors as well
Kind of makes me doubt the veracity of the whole post (not that I wouldn't put it past MS). The other possibility is that Dell really is being taken over by "dudes."
Slashdot Mirror
Mod this up. It is amazing what a bit of research will reveal. No doubt for common tasks the keyboard is faster, but it quickly breaks down. For the example in the original article of File-Open, while the alt-f-o might be quick (or command-o on a mac), you still will have the problem of selecting the file you want, which will almost certainly be faster with the mouse. I actually find that when using the mac terminal, if I need to open a file not in my current directory, it is almost always faster for me to find a file in the finder and drag it to the terminal window (which conveniently pastes in the full path) than to navigate to the file by keyboard/tab completion. YMMV, but remember that YM is not always the same as YPM (your perceived mileage).
Most good evolution texts will have a section on Kimura's Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, which is the basis for most of the current thinking in molecular evolution. That said, it forms more of a null hypothesis than a working theory.
In any case, I have completely neglected to give you real references, and that is mostly because I want to give you things that are at an appropriate level for you. Let me know what your background is, and whether you have access to a good library, or if I should try to find things that are freely available on the web...
My email address is my user name at mac.com
With respect to the specific case here, we will do a bit of common sense for ourselves: imagine a gene that has no effect when heterozygous but is lethal when homozygous. Now when that gene is common, there will be a good number of homozygotes to kill off through selection. Great. But now imagine that it is at low frequency, say 1/1,000. Then the homozygotes will be only at a frequency of 1/1,000,000... So roughly 2 copies of the lethal gene will be eliminated each generation in a population of a million, while there are still 998 copies floating around the population. It will take a very long time to completely eliminate the gene from the population. Random effects will speed up the loss in most cases (and to be clear, most of the time the gene won't even get to the low frequency I hypothesized), but at the same time those random effects can keep the gene around much longer than you would expect in a deterministic case.
Finally, I would also like to point out that this is all a very active area of research. The precise effects of different kinds of selection and random drift under different situations (subdivided populations, bottlenecks, population growth, etc) are still only somewhat known. We are learning a lot, but it takes a lot of time/effort. Common sense is rarely very informative. (Hence the big iron over at the Sanger center that was mentioned a few articles back)
It let me see that one prospective condo was right in a corner of fairly low crime, bordered by much higher crime. I could have guessed that visiting the neighborhood, but it was nice to see somewhat empirically.
Amen. If only I had mod points.
The other (final?) point is that to look at Chicago as a "college" is really missing the boat. The graduate population dwarfs the undergraduate, and since we were originally talking about a grad student's research, that was where my comments were focussed.
Chicago is not Harvard. Harvard is not Oxford. And none of them are the University of Kansas. I can make trivial statements too!
I think there are many who would disagree with your comment on the Nobel. It think it is pretty hard to argue that a prize that goes to one group once a year is being given out like candy. Usually that implies that there are many out there. Given out like the lottery would be fair statement, but I would still guess that many would disagree.
Now as to this idea that most people haven't heard of Chicago: I do not disagree at all. However, to claim that what the hoi polloi know is a good measure of quality is pretty weak. People at top levels of academia, buisiness, law, medicine, etc. all know about the University of Chicago, and it is highly respected there. I think you might be confusing US News with a measure of quality.
I want to be quite clear here. I am not arguing that Harvard is not the best school in the country. It may well be, and graduates of it always seem quite determined to self-validate by making a big point of such rankings. However, to suggest that any school consistently in the top 20 is "hardly a significant player" is an untenable position.
BTW, what are oppritunities? Because if that is what Harvard is giving out, I don't think I want them.
Do you really want to keep playing?
different FROM! different FROM! (or if you are more British than American, different TO!) Grammar on /.: a waste of my time, I know.
That would be a possibility, but two things make it unlikely (from the actual Nature article, which I can read, being at a University with a subscription): One is that if it were just a region of high mutation, then you would expect to see other changes in the gene. They don't find them. The other thing is that they have this behavior at 11 sites in the gene. So it is not as if there is one site that is flipping around all the time. There is something strange going on. I don't really have a good sense of what it is, and the RNA backup hypothesis will be pretty easy to check. I expect there will be a lot of work on this in the next few years, and we should have some answers soon enough.
Ugh. And now cars with CD players are a pain in the ass to use with ipods. I am back in the time when I had to use a radio transmitter to play tapes in the car. Why they don't just add a minijack as a standard feature on car radios these days is beyond me.
Now don't ask me why Y2K required building a backup facility (fears of NYC apocalypse, maybe, which would be sadly ironic) but it turned out to be a good idea. And clearly there was some benefit to all of the other upgrades that were undertaken at the same time ("while we are spending all this money, why don't we...").
Well, the robot is actually going to be doing a chunk of the building of the elevator. Once the first strand is up, the robot's first job will be to bring more and more strands up until the whole shebang can support some real weight. I would say the real showstopper is probably getting the carbon nanotubes long enough and strong enough. They wil certainly have plenty of time to get the robot tuned before that is ready.
You'd better be going for the intentional irony.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say organisms. You know:trees, bacteria, viruses, birds, cats... I could go on. Come to think of it, it might even be a pretty good way to design humans!
The gene does not cause infertility, just maleness. So it can spread. Which is in fact what they want; They can't very well introduce the gene into all of the fish out there (if they could, they would have just killed them all) so what they want to do is introduce this gene, then as it spreads, gradually the proportion of males in the population will increase. When you have all males, then the population dies. There are, of course, problems with this approach. One is the potential for accidental spread, both to other populations of carp outside Australia, and to other species.* Another is that the females who are left are likely to produce more surviving offspring (population limits in fish are not usually from the number of eggs produced). Another is that it will take a while to have huge effects, during which time mutations might arise that block this mechanism and allow female development. Such a mutation would spread rapidly (it would be highly favored by selection once the population got far off 50-50) so you would be back a square one. Biocontrol of introduced species is notoriously bad, particularly in Australia. See Cane Toads. We are exceptionally bad at foreseeing all of the downstream consequences of such manipulations of the ecosystem. A cool idea, and some great work by the scientists, but lets hope that they think long and hard before releasing these fish into the wild. *do you really think that all those extra male carp will ignore the chance for some kinky inter-species romance? It just takes one...
More like "Wow, what a stupid set of 'benchmarks'! Nice to know that an app that no one uses on a mac (Premiere) and one developed by MS (that no one needs too much speed for) run slower on a Mac. But look, the app that people actually use (Photoshop) actually does better on the Mac." I'll keep waiting for a benchmark that is trustworthy. Until then, I'll use the computer that lets me do the work I need to do most efficiently. Turns out that is a Mac. It may happen to be the fastest computer as well, but we are still waiting for a good test.
Well there it is! If it requires our intelligence to make some bits of dna play tic-tac-toe, clearly there was a creator that made it do something as complicated as make us. I may as well give up my work toward a PhD evolutionary biology right now. Damn scientists proving the existence of God... excuse me, that's "intelligent designer".
Just reread my post, and though no one on slashdot will care one whit, I must correct my grammar. It shoudl read: "they will not look like morons." Not "they will not look like a moron." I suppose I could have said, "it will not look like a moron," but somehow, referring to a corporation as a moron seems odd, no matter how often its logo tries to anthropomorphize.
IANAL either, but my brother is, and I think that you have 1 year from public annoucement to patent an idea. So they would not look like a moron at all.
IBM is something of a different beast, seeing as they produce hardware. Innovations in manufacturing and such are much easier to justify to managers than advances in pure math. The really sad fact is that there have been few great advances in software at all since the gui (if you agree that that was an advance).
The sad thing is, MS has long had a good research department. They hire very bright people and pay them a lot. But bright people with great ideas and great research doesn't mean that any of that good stuff will ever make it into production code. Marketing drones and codemonkeys do a good job of stopping that. If only people would listen to the real eggheads.
Ah for Plato's republic of philosopher kings... of course, it didn't really work out on the Simpsons...
You'd think that a robot like this would have an easy time flying. I mean, all you have to do is leave out the bit where you program it to know about falling, right?
Umm... then it would not be the GPL. Time for a primer on licensing...
And why hasn't anyone noticed this obvious grammar mistake? It should read: this *affects* all of our competitors as well
Kind of makes me doubt the veracity of the whole post (not that I wouldn't put it past MS). The other possibility is that Dell really is being taken over by "dudes."