From observational evidence, it isn't that people with the deletion are actually immune to HIV, it is that they are less likely to be infected at a given viral load. If a person has the deletion in both copies of the gene coding for CCR5, they still may be able to be infected with HIV - but the rate of spread is significantly decreased. It takes a critical level of the virus, and a critical proportion of infected cells, meaning that it takes time (often several years) for the syndrome to manifest.
It is rather helpful to find anything at all more about HIV - it is a confusing virus, and one that is certainly evolving along with our drug treatments for it. Research is stymied, sometimes, by the unwillingness of governements and funding bodies to confront the epidemic, based on, essentially, fear of talking about sex. More reasonably, it is also difficult to perform experiments with the virus, based on ethical and moral considerations with respect to possible test subjects....
(The moral of the story is, if you want a SARS flu vaccine, you get the Chinese government to make it....it have no qualms about injecting prisoners with `maybes.' In a Western country, one would never stand for such a violation of ones rights, and yet the West has no problem with using the results of such experiments. It is worthwile examining ones own moral view on these sorts of tests. )
You're right, there most certainly are those in the medical-historical community who argue that the precise disease may not have been yersinia pestis. The point is, there is no way to run a test on the DNA of a bacterium(or virus, if that's what it was) that was around 400 years ago. There have been inconclusive attempts to get samples from skeletal remains.
Note, from my previous post, I discussed influenza. Influenza mutates so rapidly, that even if an ancestor selected for CCR5-Delta32, modern influenza may do nothing of the sort.
Another intriguing genetic tidbit. It is widely believed that the black death selected for incidences of Downs' syndrome (which is an extra copy of chormosome 21) - witness relative population rates of Downs' syndrome vis a vis caucasian/European populations and other communities - there are significantly more individuals with the condition in caucasion/European populations.
Information about the CCR5-\Delta-32 and possible links with selection events occuring with respect to the plague have been known for several years, but there is no concensus on the issue.
What has/not/ been seen (and if there is a paper reference that claims to do so, I would very much like to see it), is evidence that yersinia pestis and HIV actually use the same receptor, and thus the selection event even makes any sense. Given that yersinia pestis is a bacteria (albeit one with a large plasmid), and HIV a virus, this seems, at a perfunctory first thought, unlikely. However, it could be true.
The article seems to imply that this deletion is only evident in the people of Eyam...as you can imagine, this is not the case. It is evident in different levels amongst ethnic groups worldwide. See Stephens et al, "Dating the Origin of the CCR5-Delta32 AIDS-resistance allele by the coalesence of haplotypes", American Journal of Human Genetics, 62: 1507-1515,1998.
Eyeballing the data, it looks like the further you get from Europe, the less likely to have high levels of the allele. Which is odd, if the black plague is at fault. There are several theoreis as to the origin of yersinia pestis, the most common being a transfer from marmot populations in Mongolia/Inner Mongolia (they are still a resevoir of the disease...but then so are ground squirrels in California), and another hypothesis being of a sub-saharan African origin. The answer, I suspect, will never be perfectly resolved ( I blame the marmots..), but it is in precisely these orginating areas (potentially), that the humans have the lowest levels of he mutation.
There was an excellent article (whose reference I cannot currently find, I apologize), that used a population dynamics approach, and concluded that the current levels of the deletion are too high to have been caused entirely by the black death selection event - that event is too recent for such a high allelic frequency. However, a longer history of influenza (which is a/virus/), and has been with humanity for 1000s of years, could have selected for such a deletion. The catastrophic nature of the event was never has high as that of yersinia pestis, but it was recurrent throughtout generations.
The history and biology of yersinia pestis, and HIV/AIDS are fascinating. I suggest that one does some reading on the history of governmental ineptitude and institutional discrimination surrounding both. Black Plague, San Fransisco, 1905. AIDS, San Fransisco, 1980.
Mathematics is one of the most intensely human of human endeavours. Everything in it is a production of the human mind entirely. Yes, the real world can sometime lead us into an interesting area of inquiry, but at its core the uncoverings of truth from axioms is a human endeavour.
A computer can be a useful tool (I'll be doing computational graph theory this summer), but it is not human. It does not have the ability to hold the possiblities of ideal forms within it and understand. It does not think.
The use of numeric methods to solve applied problems, or symbolic methods to pure problems is good and useful, but it does not constitute proof.
A human being, given an understanding of the underlying mathematics, must be able to go through the proof step by step, and see that, from the givens, the conclusion is inevitable.
I don't accept the Four-Colour theorem as proven true. I strongly suspect it to be so, but my suspicion does not truth make.
The Riemann hypothesis, on the other hand, is much, much further from being proved then the Four-Colour Theorem. Yes, millions of zeroes have been checked...but there are infinitely many zeroes, and all it takes for it to be false is for ONE of those zeroes to fall off the Re=1/2 part of the complex plane.
If I were giving odds, then millions divided by infinity is awfully close to zero.
Given that the article in question concerns a McGill student, I fail to see how quoting US copyright law is even remotely relevant.
I have a professor who uses the system and I careful licenced my paper before I submitted it. (And she couldn't deal with the PDF and never actually submitted it to the database anyway, and she just printed it and marked it. But then she knows I'd never, ever, cheat.)
I'm not sure I quite understand what all the rage is about graphing calculators. I recommend the HP 32SII. They stopped making it ~a year and a half a go, but I suspect you can still find new ones floating around.
If you need graphical dispaly of a function, use Maple of Mathematica. If you need a handy, durable, amazing RPN calculator, then get the 32SII. (Which I let sit next to me for my graph theory exam...again, an object lesson in the uselessness of calculators in REAL math courses.)
At my university, Acadia University(www.acadiau.ca) in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, each student is provided with an IBM R31 as part of tuition and ethernet ports are under practically every desk.
This leads to an awful lot of ICQ messaging during classtime. Little to none of the discussions during lecture are subject related or even school related. Good students pay attention and take notes like they would have under any regime. The students who would have been passing notes 30 years ago are passing ICQ messages, arranging to meet at the bar that evening.
Since the laptops are a matter of school policy, every attempt is made to "integrate" them into the learning environment. In almost all contexts this is done clumsily and without positive effect - and this school has had this program in effect for over 6 years.
Acadia has the highest university tuition in Canada thanks to this technological "improvement", and often wonder if it is worth it...but then I remember how good the faculty is, and I remember that I like the place...
I attend Acadia University in Wolfville,Nova Scotia, Canada. For aboutt he last 7 years, laptops have come leased as part of Acadia's tuition. It's called the 'Acadia Advantage'. Generally, it is a disadvantage. The lease(a mandatory one, IBM only) makes Acadia have the highest undergraduate tuition of anywhere in Canada, and the one-size-fits all laptop solution doesn't work to the students' advantage. I am involved with two departments here, Mathematics and Theatre. Because every student has their own laptop, there is no money for other computers. They expect computational mathematics to take place under windows? The university tech staff won't even support linux at all. The theatre department can make use of computers to do video editing, sound work and lighting control. But wait, the industry standard, reliable, sound and video work is done on Macs...no money for those either.
Education doesn't require computers, it requires learning. This laptop(which I have sitting on the kitchen table right now) is sort of handy, I suppose, but it has in no way helped me to learn anything I couldn't have learned otherwise - and the desktop I build this summer was one hell of a lot cheaper than the extra IBM-tax tuition I pay for this.
Thanks for the correction - I'm currently running 4.5, and as soon as I get some make buildworld action I hope to be up to 4.7....(I have some problems with making world...we suspect that either my hard drives(mirrored) or the RAID controller is at fault.
Although it may seem to you that some versions of software used in FreeBSD are a few versions behind linux there is a very good reason for this. The FreeBSD ethic values stability before anything. If something works, and the 'newest' version is not stable enough for the Release Team, than the older version will be used. This is the first FreeBSD release to include XFree86 4.2.x as a default package - which you have all been using for a while. As of 4.6, it wasn't considered stable enough, so 3.3.x was used.
FreeBSD's concept of 'stable' it about 10 times more stable than that of most code in various linuxes. That is a conscious, conservative choice made by the core team. And I like that choice.
FreeBSD supports full linux binary emulation - and any X driver for any video card (just ask my RIVA TNT2) works under FreeBSD ( I can't speak for the other BSD's, but I suspect something similar occurs.).
Encode the binary describing your invention/discovery in the way in which the bricks in a building are placed - either different colours or having some bricks further in or out. Then, in your will, you reveal the deencryption techinque (or even just the fact that the message is there).
Of course, if the building is condemned before you die.....
The most interesting thing in this article, as the speed itself isn't blow-your-mind-out-of-the-sky for current wireless, is that this will be backwards compatible with current 802.11b. Doubling of the bandwidth for parts of the wireless commmunities that have spread up will gradually take place - and we'll all be the better for it.
And in the future, all RAM is going to come in a hypointelligent shade of the colour purple to complement the neon-red motherboard, the puke green power supply and the XP-ugly os on most computers. Now aren't you glad you didn't get a clear box?
It depends on the purpose of the flatpanel in question - if I were a hardcore quake III player, then an LCD would be unacceptable. However, as I mostly use my computer for doing math, and the games I do play are old, the savings in desk space afforded by an LCD just might be worth it when I go to purchase my new system this summer.
In related news, port scans of wehavethewayout.com indicate that it is running on a GameBoy Advance. It is reputed to be much more stable than the Windows IIS put in to replace the FreeBSD box.
So you hit F-11 and go full screen and you don't see the banner ad....and that's why opera 6 kicks ass(also the fact that it is really fast, renders most stuff without complaint, and in terms or page render speed...I'm reading something else while a page is rendering). I have found it to be faster than mozilla in the past, though I haven't tried the 1.0 yet and plan to do so know.
The mouse driver people don't sell/personalized/ versions of their product directly. They sell the normal non-personalized one directly via their website. It's not cost effective for them to sell logo-imprinted versions in small lots, and it's easier for them to outsource the logo work.
Slashdot Mirror
From observational evidence, it isn't that people with the deletion are actually immune to HIV, it is that they are less likely to be infected at a given viral load. If a person has the deletion in both copies of the gene coding for CCR5, they still may be able to be infected with HIV - but the rate of spread is significantly decreased. It takes a critical level of the virus, and a critical proportion of infected cells, meaning that it takes time (often several years) for the syndrome to manifest.
It is rather helpful to find anything at all more about HIV - it is a confusing virus, and one that is certainly evolving along with our drug treatments for it. Research is stymied, sometimes, by the unwillingness of governements and funding bodies to confront the epidemic, based on, essentially, fear of talking about sex. More reasonably, it is also difficult to perform experiments with the virus, based on ethical and moral considerations with respect to possible test subjects....
(The moral of the story is, if you want a SARS flu vaccine, you get the Chinese government to make it....it have no qualms about injecting prisoners with `maybes.' In a Western country, one would never stand for such a violation of ones rights, and yet the West has no problem with using the results of such experiments. It is worthwile examining ones own moral view on these sorts of tests. )
You're right, there most certainly are those in the medical-historical community who argue that the precise disease may not have been yersinia pestis. The point is, there is no way to run a test on the DNA of a bacterium(or virus, if that's what it was) that was around 400 years ago. There have been inconclusive attempts to get samples from skeletal remains.
Note, from my previous post, I discussed influenza. Influenza mutates so rapidly, that even if an ancestor selected for CCR5-Delta32, modern influenza may do nothing of the sort.
Another intriguing genetic tidbit. It is widely believed that the black death selected for incidences of Downs' syndrome (which is an extra copy of chormosome 21) - witness relative population rates of Downs' syndrome vis a vis caucasian/European populations and other communities - there are significantly more individuals with the condition in caucasion/European populations.
Information about the CCR5-\Delta-32 and possible links with selection events occuring with respect to the plague have been known for several years, but there is no concensus on the issue.
/not/ been seen (and if there is a paper reference that claims to do so, I would very much like to see it), is evidence that yersinia pestis and HIV actually use the same receptor, and thus the selection event even makes any sense. Given that yersinia pestis is a bacteria (albeit one with a large plasmid), and HIV a virus, this seems, at a perfunctory first thought, unlikely. However, it could be true.
/virus/), and has been with humanity for 1000s of years, could have selected for such a deletion. The catastrophic nature of the event was never has high as that of yersinia pestis, but it was recurrent throughtout generations.
What has
The article seems to imply that this deletion is only evident in the people of Eyam...as you can imagine, this is not the case. It is evident in different levels amongst ethnic groups worldwide. See Stephens et al, "Dating the Origin of the CCR5-Delta32 AIDS-resistance allele by the coalesence of haplotypes", American Journal of Human Genetics, 62: 1507-1515,1998.
Eyeballing the data, it looks like the further you get from Europe, the less likely to have high levels of the allele.
Which is odd, if the black plague is at fault. There are several theoreis as to the origin of yersinia pestis, the most common being a transfer from marmot populations in Mongolia/Inner Mongolia (they are still a resevoir of the disease...but then so are ground squirrels in California), and another hypothesis being of a sub-saharan African origin. The answer, I suspect, will never be perfectly resolved ( I blame the marmots..), but it is in precisely these orginating areas (potentially), that the humans have the lowest levels of he mutation.
There was an excellent article (whose reference I cannot currently find, I apologize), that used a population dynamics approach, and concluded that the current levels of the deletion are too high to have been caused entirely by the black death selection event - that event is too recent for such a high allelic frequency. However, a longer history of influenza (which is a
The history and biology of yersinia pestis, and HIV/AIDS are fascinating. I suggest that one does some reading on the history of governmental ineptitude and institutional discrimination surrounding both. Black Plague, San Fransisco, 1905. AIDS, San Fransisco, 1980.
That was supposed to say "with impunity that 2 is less than or equal to 2", but Slashdot ate my lesser than sign.
Zero is awfully close to zero. So what's the problem?
I can say with impunity that 2 = 2.
Mathematics is one of the most intensely human of human endeavours. Everything in it is a production of the human mind entirely. Yes, the real world can sometime lead us into an interesting area of inquiry, but at its core the uncoverings of truth from axioms is a human endeavour.
A computer can be a useful tool (I'll be doing computational graph theory this summer), but it is not human. It does not have the ability to hold the possiblities of ideal forms within it and understand. It does not think.
The use of numeric methods to solve applied problems, or symbolic methods to pure problems is good and useful, but it does not constitute proof.
A human being, given an understanding of the underlying mathematics, must be able to go through the proof step by step, and see that, from the givens, the conclusion is inevitable.
I don't accept the Four-Colour theorem as proven true. I strongly suspect it to be so, but my suspicion does not truth make.
The Riemann hypothesis, on the other hand, is much, much further from being proved then the Four-Colour Theorem. Yes, millions of zeroes have been checked...but there are infinitely many zeroes, and all it takes for it to be false is for ONE of those zeroes to fall off the Re=1/2 part of the complex plane.
If I were giving odds, then millions divided by infinity is awfully close to zero.
Thanks to a faculty strike, (and professors locked out of campus) I had the privilege of attending last week's Math seminar in the local Lion's hall.
It was the first time I'd ever been to a math seminar with an open bar.
Given that the article in question concerns a McGill student, I fail to see how quoting US copyright law is even remotely relevant.
I have a professor who uses the system and I careful licenced my paper before I submitted it. (And she couldn't deal with the PDF and never actually submitted it to the database anyway, and she just printed it and marked it. But then she knows I'd never, ever, cheat.)
I'm not sure I quite understand what all the rage is about graphing calculators. I recommend the HP 32SII. They stopped making it ~a year and a half a go, but I suspect you can still find new ones floating around.
If you need graphical dispaly of a function, use Maple of Mathematica. If you need a handy, durable, amazing RPN calculator, then get the 32SII. (Which I let sit next to me for my graph theory exam...again, an object lesson in the uselessness of calculators in REAL math courses.)
Standing on the steet corner in downtown Charlottetown(PEI, Canada) talking to some friends and poking through an issue of Wired.
G: Look, there's a fly on the page.
D:That's a feature, not a bug.
At my university, Acadia University(www.acadiau.ca) in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, each student is provided with an IBM R31 as part of tuition and ethernet ports are under practically every desk.
This leads to an awful lot of ICQ messaging during classtime. Little to none of the discussions during lecture are subject related or even school related. Good students pay attention and take notes like they would have under any regime. The students who would have been passing notes 30 years ago are passing ICQ messages, arranging to meet at the bar that evening.
Since the laptops are a matter of school policy, every attempt is made to "integrate" them into the learning environment. In almost all contexts this is done clumsily and without positive effect - and this school has had this program in effect for over 6 years.
Acadia has the highest university tuition in Canada thanks to this technological "improvement", and often wonder if it is worth it...but then I remember how good the faculty is, and I remember that I like the place...
-traser
Now that would make a ... smooth...beer.
I attend Acadia University in Wolfville,Nova Scotia, Canada. For aboutt he last 7 years, laptops have come leased as part of Acadia's tuition. It's called the 'Acadia Advantage'. Generally, it is a disadvantage. The lease(a mandatory one, IBM only) makes Acadia have the highest undergraduate tuition of anywhere in Canada, and the one-size-fits all laptop solution doesn't work to the students' advantage. I am involved with two departments here, Mathematics and Theatre. Because every student has their own laptop, there is no money for other computers. They expect computational mathematics to take place under windows? The university tech staff won't even support linux at all. The theatre department can make use of computers to do video editing, sound work and lighting control. But wait, the industry standard, reliable, sound and video work is done on Macs...no money for those either.
Education doesn't require computers, it requires learning. This laptop(which I have sitting on the kitchen table right now) is sort of handy, I suppose, but it has in no way helped me to learn anything I couldn't have learned otherwise - and the desktop I build this summer was one hell of a lot cheaper than the extra IBM-tax tuition I pay for this.
Thanks for the correction - I'm currently running 4.5, and as soon as I get some make buildworld action I hope to be up to 4.7....(I have some problems with making world...we suspect that either my hard drives(mirrored) or the RAID controller is at fault.
Although it may seem to you that some versions of software used in FreeBSD are a few versions behind linux there is a very good reason for this. The FreeBSD ethic values stability before anything. If something works, and the 'newest' version is not stable enough for the Release Team, than the older version will be used. This is the first FreeBSD release to include XFree86 4.2.x as a default package - which you have all been using for a while. As of 4.6, it wasn't considered stable enough, so 3.3.x was used.
FreeBSD's concept of 'stable' it about 10 times more stable than that of most code in various linuxes. That is a conscious, conservative choice made by the core team. And I like that choice.
FreeBSD supports full linux binary emulation - and any X driver for any video card (just ask my RIVA TNT2) works under FreeBSD ( I can't speak for the other BSD's, but I suspect something similar occurs.).
Kudos for the unreal team - it's about time more software was released first run with linux/bsd support.
Encode the binary describing your invention/discovery in the way in which the bricks in a building are placed - either different colours or having some bricks further in or out. Then, in your will, you reveal the deencryption techinque (or even just the fact that the message is there).
Of course, if the building is condemned before you die.....
The most interesting thing in this article, as the speed itself isn't blow-your-mind-out-of-the-sky for current wireless, is that this will be backwards compatible with current 802.11b.
Doubling of the bandwidth for parts of the wireless commmunities that have spread up will gradually take place - and we'll all be the better for it.
And in the future, all RAM is going to come in a hypointelligent shade of the colour purple to complement the neon-red motherboard, the puke green power supply and the XP-ugly os on most computers. Now aren't you glad you didn't get a clear box?
The real question, why would Apple want to show a GUI on the mac that you could use instead of it's own?
The last time I checked castration has little if anything to do with the penis.....
It depends on the purpose of the flatpanel in question - if I were a hardcore quake III player, then an LCD would be unacceptable. However, as I mostly use my computer for doing math, and the games I do play are old, the savings in desk space afforded by an LCD just might be worth it when I go to purchase my new system this summer.
In related news, port scans of wehavethewayout.com indicate that it is running on a GameBoy Advance. It is reputed to be much more stable than the Windows IIS put in to replace the FreeBSD box.
So you hit F-11 and go full screen and you don't see the banner ad....and that's why opera 6 kicks ass(also the fact that it is really fast, renders most stuff without complaint, and in terms or page render speed...I'm reading something else while a page is rendering). I have found it to be faster than mozilla in the past, though I haven't tried the 1.0 yet and plan to do so know.
The mouse driver people don't sell /personalized/ versions of their product directly. They sell the normal non-personalized one directly via their website. It's not cost effective for them to sell logo-imprinted versions in small lots, and it's easier for them to outsource the logo work.