"You wouldn't get the sights and sounds of a campus, personal contact with professors, or beer-soaked frat parties, but you'd end up with the knowledge you need and the degree to prove it."
Personal contact with professors. Don't need that. I realize this is supposed to be provocative and snarky but --
He's suggesting a two-class society, in which some of us will be alphas and go on to first-class colleges, while the rest of us will be betas and memorize pages from the Internet.
When you go to college, you're in an educational environment 24/7, getting exposed to more ideas and experiences than most people get otherwise in a lifetime.
Can you imagine spending all your waking hours for 4 years on the Internet hooked up to the University of Phoenix?
To me, the classic moment of college was standing up in a classroom having to defend a position that people disagree with. And then arguing about it later in the cafeteria or dorm. If you've never spent all night arguing over the existence of God, then you never had an education.
Most of the important things I learned at college -- computers, biology, art, music, new sexual positions, fixing cars -- I learned bullshitting with my friends over at my house, or over somebody's dining room table, or just hanging out. And yes we did have a few drinks or a joint. And yes it's nice to have some girls join you in your intellectual explorations. It was also nice to have a library where books were arranged according to the LC call number so whatever you were interested in, you could find a whole shelf on the subject, and read whatever you wanted (even if it was under copyright). And it was nice to go over to the computer lab or physics lab and try to crash the system. And it was nice to run into my professor in the supermarket.
This model of an education is like a factory worker punching in a time clock and sitting on an assembly line for 8 hours. Talk about obsolete models.
You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant. I know that the Republicans saw it as a huge victory when Clinton was impeached basically for having an extramarital affair (and don't tell me that it was for perjury; it was his personal life that was on trial), but, in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit. I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests. Likewise, I'm much less concerned about a president who lies about his private life than one who lies about justifications for war.
So, no, I'm not particularly concerned about politicians hiding emails to their girlfriends/boyfriends. We should be so lucky if that's all they were hiding. It's more the potential bribes, nepotism/cronyism, and backroom deals that I'm worried about. Those are the type of things that actually conflict with good governance—in other words, government corruption.
Spitzer's name was exposed during a supposedly confidential investigation by Republican federal prosecutors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegelman As it turned out, they didn't have evidence of a crime to charge him with.
The supposed victim of this affair, Spitzer's wife, didn't want him to resign. Why should she? What good does it do her to have her husband lose his job?
I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests.
Well the way the Republicans get away with destroying civil liberties, supporting torture, and selling the American public out to corporate interests is by distracting voters with sex scandals.
What amazes me is that supposedly intelligent people, like New York Times columnists, let the Republicans put this over on them twice (with Clinton and again with Spitzer). It's hard to believe that they're so stupid. I wonder if there's another reason.
Spitzer was a victim, BTW, of the indiscriminate financial reporting laws which give the attorney generals indiscriminate power to go after anyone they want, including the other party. The only consolation is that Spitzer played this game himself, so there is a defense of of being hoisted on his own petard.
It's not ionizing. It's not heat. How do you exclude every other possibility?
Cells are fairly resilient - a small amount of heat isn't that big a deal.
Yes but there are an awful lot of them, and every time they duplicate they make an average of about 8 usually inconsequential errors. The DNA repair mechanisms are in a constant struggle to keep up with the errors. All it takes is 1 cell with 2 or 3 of the wrong mutations and you've got cancer.
Mind you I don't believe that EMF or radio towers cause cancer. I'm swimming in EMF, and I haven't seen anything that would make me worry about it.
But there are some odd blinded controlled studies that found EMF would affect mammalian cells growing in culture, at levels too low to be heat effects and comparable to the levels that power lines emit.
I'm arguing that we can't yet exclude the possibility that EMFs are causing those effects. Of course it might be because the sleep-deprived lab assistant screwed up the cell culture or something (stranger things have happened). It might not be repeatable.
I saw it cited in the IEEE Spectrum article on EMF several years ago. I don't know if anyone tried to replicate it. If other people tried to repeat it and it didn't work, then I'll agree with you that there's no effect.
But if they can repeatedly show an effect in cell culture at EMF levels too low for thermal effect, then the effect of that radiation is an open question, with a mechanism that apparently exists but can't be identified.
Most of the effect on human tissue is heating and in the microwave range.
Yeah, people make calculations assuming that the only effect could be thermal, in which case you're right.
But there could be another mechanism, even one we don't know about yet.
I don't believe low-level electromagnetic radiation is dangerous, but there are studies that show cells grown in culture exposed to low-level radiation had more mutations than unexposed cells. (I forget the details, but I read about it in IEEE Spectrum. )
Cell reproduction is pretty complicated. How do you exclude the possibility that EMF may cause a mutation by an unknown mechanism? My first thought would be to duplicate the experiment and hope it turns out differently. But suppose you can duplicate it?
After all, low-level magnetic fields have biological effects -- birds navigate by them.
You don't need lots of science to test a specific case like the one in question: "does living near an AM tower increase your risk of cancer?" All you need is some reliable data on cancer rates for people who live near one versus those who live far away from one.
Actually you do need a lot of science. You can't assume that the people who are living near the AM tower have the same risks of cancer as the people who are living farther away. Correcting for all the risk factors is damn hard.
For example, take power lines. I used to help a guy work on his hot rods, rebuilding the engine and stuff. Really nice guy, pretty smart, and his Olds really took off, but he was kind of a lower-income working-class guy. His mom's house had power lines in the back. Now comfortable middle-class people with lots of money don't usually live in houses with power lines in the back yard. Poor people are different in lots of ways. They eat different foods. They smoke more cigarettes. They drink more (or at least cheaper) booze. They have less access to health care. If you find that people living next to power lines have more cancer, is it the power lines, or is it the cigarettes? Or is it the asbestos he was inhaling in the place he worked?
You can find studies that show power lines, or radio transmitters, or whatever are associated with all kids of things. But it seems to be (although it isn't certain) that it's because they didn't correct for other factors.
how does it compare to having a cell phone, or really any kind of radio transmitter, or even your neighbor having one... and shouldn't all those things be banned first before we start blowing up radio towers.
Now you're getting there. IEEE Spectrum once did a big article on the hazards of EMF, and the engineers who actually went to peoples' houses with meters reported that the strongest exposure to EMF came from hair dryers, electric shavers and kitchen blenders. So let's ban those things and then blow up radio towers.
The NYPL is doing something similar. President Paul LeClerc got a ton of money from wealthy contributors, and he's de-emphasizing the print collection and boosting the digital collections.
The signature example of that was selling the Donnell Library on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/arts/design/07nypl.html The Donnell was a landmark library for 50 years, that people grew up with, and a magnet for teenage science nerds, poetry fans, etc., from around the City and neighboring suburbs. They had the best collection of science books for children and teenagers I've ever seen, and one of the first record and film collections. LeClerc made a deal with a hotel to tear down the Donnell Library (which he's already done) and build a hotel in its place, with a library half the size in the basement (that part of the deal fell through with the financial crisis). The theory was that the new library wouldn't need as many books, because it would have a big digital collection.
In general, LeClerc is leading the NYPL to build up its digital collection at the expense of the paper collection. This is good in some ways, if I want to look something up in their digital newspaper collection, or some of their digital science and technology journals. It's bad in other ways, since most of the major medical journals I want to read are too expensive for them to subscribe to online. (Most journals charge libraries a fee based on the number of students and faculty in their school, and a NYPL librarian told me that the New England Journal of Medicine would charge them a fee based on the entire population of New York.)
With infinite money (or far enough in the future), a digital collection could be as good as or better than a paper collection for most (but not all) purposes, and might be better overall. But with the money and technology they have now, a digital collection loses an awful lot.
The librarians told me that the Donnell had special collections, such as foreign language collections in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Yiddish (!), and every language they speak in New York -- more languages than Google. When they closed the Donnell, they broke up the collection, and most of the books were just thrown out as garbage. (I once looked up some books from the 1960s in Spanish on Mexican murals. When Isaac Bashevits Singer won the Nobel Prize, I looked up some of his Yiddish short stories and struggled through them with my German and Hebrew.)
In the 1980s, I worked for McGraw-Hill, and one of the best things about that company was that I could use the McGraw-Hill library. McGraw-Hill published about 50 business and technical magazines in the electrical, mining, machining, chemical, aerospace and I forgot what other industries. They had files of trade magazines going back to 1917, with standard reference books for every industry, and a book division with elementary, high school and college textbooks (think Samuelson's Economics), and classic business and technical books. They also had a great journalism collection. The guys who built the electrical industry in the 1930s wrote articles about it for McGraw-Hill magazines. You could stand in front of the bookshelf on that industry and get a good idea of what the industry was all about.
The top management was really pushing computerization. They decided to throw out all the books and magazines and replace them with Nexis and other databases (because the McGraw-Hill magazines were on Nexis, they got a special deal). Realize that this was a publishing company, whose employees had dedicated their lives to books. Instead of getting a book or magazine, all you could get was 20-page printouts (dot matrix, no pictures). We used to refer to it as the Alexandrian Library at McGraw-Hill.
if the library is in fact Digital it can easily be backed up somewhere.
Yes, but it may be backed up on a publisher's server behind a pay for access firewall.
I used to subscribe to the New York Times online for $50 a year, and I could get any article 150 years back -- in other words, any article I ever read in the NYT in my entire life. Then they changed the terms of service, and made the archive free back to (I think) 1980, and then $4 or something an article before then. I'm not going to pay $4 an article, so as far as home access is concerned, it's gone forever.
Science librarians are complaining about that problem. If you subscribe to a print journal, you put it on the shelves and it's there for good. If you subscribe to an online journal, it's accessible only for as long as you subscribe. If the publisher raises his subscription price and your library decides they can't afford it any more, you can't read the old issues any more.
you should be able to get digital copies (manual scans if you have to) of the books you already have
I think Google got the cost of scanning a book down to $1 a page, with some heavily automated expensive equipment.
As I type this comment I have in front of me the 1892 edition of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader. At the foot of page 105 I can read the signature of a Jean Macalister dated March 15 1909.
I picked up a copy of Vergil's Aeneid in a thrift shop for fifty cents. When I got to the part about Dido and Aeneas, there were hearts and flowers drawn in the margin in a feminine hand.
I understand your concern. You're logical and patent law isn't always logical.
A patent lawyer could explain this better than me, but my understanding is that a design patent is very specific, and it only covers designs that are very close to the patented design.
Suppose you got a design patent for a piece of furniture, like a set of drawers with knobs. That design patent would cover drawers with those specific knobs. If you changed the knobs, you wouldn't be violating the design patent.
Any graphic design that didn't look like the patented design wouldn't be covered. If you put a frame around the screen, that would be different enough. You could make the background one color, and the search box a contrasting color. You could make the buttons or the links look different. It has to be graphically different, but the utility can be the same. A design patent can't cover utility. If you can do the same thing in a way that looks different, you're home free.
You raise an interesting objection. Lawyers do make arguments like that. I think that practically, there are so many different ways to design a search screen that, even if hundreds of search companies took design patents on their screens, you could easily come up with another one that wasn't covered by the design patent. It's like saying, "Suppose you got a design patent on every possible T-shirt?"
Notice that Google isn't patenting the function of a search screen. They're only preventing you from using a search screen that imitates the distinctive appearance of their search screen.
If you went to law school you could learn how to be illogical.
Not only is the genetics of sexuality complicated, scientists haven't even identified all the genes.
Even worse, they identified a lot of genes that turned out to wrong.
Remember USP9Y? That's the gene that's supposed to be responsible for loss of sperm production in deletions of the AZFa region -- the balls of the AZFa region, as it were.
The New England Journal of Medicine had a report last February of a man who had the whole USP9Y gene deleted, and still was able to produce sperm. In fact, his father had the same USP9Y deletion.
You can divide the genes that determine human sexuality into two groups. One group determines the form that genitals take. The other group determines all the other physical and psychological aspects of sexuality. Conceptually, it's easy to see how someone could develop with female genitals and everything else male. That doesn't mean that anyone has identified it as a syndrome, much less the genes and protein-level mechanisms.
I assume they'll give Caster Semenya a karyotyping, FISH, and test for every known gene involved with sexual development. Maybe they'll find an abnormality, and maybe they won't.
But that won't answer the question. Is somebody female because she has female genitals, XX karyotype, some arbitrary sex-determining genes, female hormones, female body type, or female reproductive ability? Gender is a social construct, not a lab test.
(BTW, I think the New Scientist had an article on this subject of sex tests for athletes a few years ago.)
The Manhattan doorman charged with hurling glasses at a woman's face at the Hudson Hotel served a month in jail for horribly disfiguring a top model by smashing a bottle across her cheek at a posh club last year.
Samir Dervisevic, 25, got into a drinking-tossing dust-up with model Liskula Cohen at Ultra on West 26th Street on Jan. 14, 2007, that ended when he cracked a bottle of vodka across her face, she tearfully recalled yesterday.
Duke of Gloucester. How long hast thou been blind?
Simpcox. Born so, master.
Duke of Gloucester. What, and wouldst climb a tree?
Simpcox. But that in all my life, when I was a youth.
Simpcox's Wife. Too true; and bought his climbing very dear.
Duke of Gloucester. Mass, thou lovedst plums well, that wouldst venture so.
Simpcox. Alas, good master, my wife desired some damsons, And made me climb, with danger of my life.
Duke of Gloucester. A subtle knave! but yet it shall not serve. Let me see thine eyes: wink now: now open them: In my opinion yet thou seest not well.
Simpcox. Yes, master, clear as day, I thank God and Saint Alban.
Duke of Gloucester. Say'st thou me so? What colour is this cloak of?
Simpcox. Red, master; red as blood.
Duke of Gloucester. Why, that's well said. What colour is my gown of?
Simpcox. Black, forsooth: coal-black as jet.
Henry VI. Why, then, thou know'st what colour jet is of?
Earl of Suffolk. And yet, I think, jet did he never see.
Duke of Gloucester. But cloaks and gowns, before this day, a many.
Simpcox's Wife. Never, before this day, in all his life.
Duke of Gloucester. Tell me, sirrah, what's my name?
Simpcox. Alas, master, I know not.
Duke of Gloucester. What's his name?
Simpcox. I know not.
Duke of Gloucester. Nor his?
Simpcox. No, indeed, master.
Duke of Gloucester. What's thine own name?
Simpcox. Saunder Simpcox, an if it please you, master.
Duke of Gloucester. Then, Saunder, sit there, the lyingest knave in Christendom. If thou hadst been born blind, thou mightest as well have known all our names as thus to name the several colours we do wear. Sight may distinguish of colours, but suddenly to nominate them all, it is impossible. My lords, Saint Alban here hath done a miracle; and would ye not think his cunning to be great, that could restore this cripple to his legs again?
Unless all mailboxes come with mandatory cameras these days.
U.S. post offices have security cameras these days. You can't mail anything that weighs >15 ounces without getting photographed, whether you know it or not.
A woman who worked for the Republican Party had an attack of conscience and mailed some documents to the Democrats, in an Express Mail envelope. She was prosecuted for theft, and part of the evidence was the Post Office security cameras. (Although I can't understand why she used Express Mail, where you have to fill out a return address and get a receipt.)
However, in these studies, all the subjects had joined the study and given permission in writing for the researchers to use their personal data.
It would clear a lot of things up if we could see the documents that the UMD professor submitted to the university's human subjects review board, and the documents they sent him in reply.
The big problem is that they finally got a good, cheap, effective, safe drug, artemisin, against the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, but it's becoming resistant.
The reason it's becoming resistant is that people in Pailin, Cambodia were using artemisin alone. If they use it alone, the P. falciparum can develop resistance to it. They're supposed to use it with another drug, like mefloquine, to kill off the parasite with shock and awe, but in some parts of the world they just use artemisin. From Cambodia, it's spreading to the rest of the world. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/361/5/455 And it's all Pailin's fault.
They can zap mosquitoes with radiation and get parasites that don't reproduce and can be used as vaccines, but you had to get bitten by a lot of them to develop immunity that way.
They also have a subunit vaccine in phase III trials, but it's only 65% effective.
That was a pretty cool study design btw -- using chloroquine to arrest the development of P. falciparum while you develop immunity. (Immunity to to P. falciparum takes a while to develop.)
Interesting thing they pointed out in an article that isn't free is that people in the malaria zone give their children aspirin to reduce the fever (most malaria deaths are children). But aspirin is an anti-platelet agent, and platelets stick to red blood cells to kill off the ones that are infected with the parasite. When the aspirin lowers the platelet activity, the parasite is more likely to survive inside the red blood cell.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see what the big deal here is, although I haven't RTFA (of course).
One of the things I learned from college was that if you don't do the reading, you won't know what's going on in class.
Small problem with that idea in the physical sciences, a simulated lab isn't much use for hands on experience.
Sometimes the physics lab doesn't work the way it says in the book.
The simulation always works the way it says in the book.
"You wouldn't get the sights and sounds of a campus, personal contact with professors, or beer-soaked frat parties, but you'd end up with the knowledge you need and the degree to prove it."
Personal contact with professors. Don't need that. I realize this is supposed to be provocative and snarky but --
He's suggesting a two-class society, in which some of us will be alphas and go on to first-class colleges, while the rest of us will be betas and memorize pages from the Internet.
When you go to college, you're in an educational environment 24/7, getting exposed to more ideas and experiences than most people get otherwise in a lifetime.
Can you imagine spending all your waking hours for 4 years on the Internet hooked up to the University of Phoenix?
To me, the classic moment of college was standing up in a classroom having to defend a position that people disagree with. And then arguing about it later in the cafeteria or dorm. If you've never spent all night arguing over the existence of God, then you never had an education.
Most of the important things I learned at college -- computers, biology, art, music, new sexual positions, fixing cars -- I learned bullshitting with my friends over at my house, or over somebody's dining room table, or just hanging out. And yes we did have a few drinks or a joint. And yes it's nice to have some girls join you in your intellectual explorations. It was also nice to have a library where books were arranged according to the LC call number so whatever you were interested in, you could find a whole shelf on the subject, and read whatever you wanted (even if it was under copyright). And it was nice to go over to the computer lab or physics lab and try to crash the system. And it was nice to run into my professor in the supermarket.
This model of an education is like a factory worker punching in a time clock and sitting on an assembly line for 8 hours. Talk about obsolete models.
They're doing this because it's cool to turn natural killer cells on and off.
Isn't that reason enough?
You know, if it were just prostitution and extramarital affairs, I wouldn't care if their emails were deleted. Those types of personal vices are rather inconsequential to being a good civil servant. I know that the Republicans saw it as a huge victory when Clinton was impeached basically for having an extramarital affair (and don't tell me that it was for perjury; it was his personal life that was on trial), but, in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit. I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests. Likewise, I'm much less concerned about a president who lies about his private life than one who lies about justifications for war.
So, no, I'm not particularly concerned about politicians hiding emails to their girlfriends/boyfriends. We should be so lucky if that's all they were hiding. It's more the potential bribes, nepotism/cronyism, and backroom deals that I'm worried about. Those are the type of things that actually conflict with good governance—in other words, government corruption.
in the grand scheme of things, personal infidelity is probably not the biggest "crime" a public official can commit.
Like Eliot Spitzer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer After Spitzer was forced out, he was replaced by David Patterson, a nice guy, whose main virtue was his ability to get along with the Republicans, who promptly paid him back by throwing the New York State legislature into chaos http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/11/ny Tom Robbins said in the Village Voice that the exercise was paid for by billionaire Tom Golisano after Spitzer wouldn't agree to cut state taxes for billionaires. http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-07-01/columns/senate-coup-plotters-hidden-agenda/
Spitzer's name was exposed during a supposedly confidential investigation by Republican federal prosecutors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegelman As it turned out, they didn't have evidence of a crime to charge him with.
The supposed victim of this affair, Spitzer's wife, didn't want him to resign. Why should she? What good does it do her to have her husband lose his job?
I'd choose a president who respects civil liberties & human rights and acts in the interest of the public, but happens to be a philander, over a president who is completely devoted to his wife, but is willing to step on civil liberties, support torture, or sell out the American public to corporate interests.
Well the way the Republicans get away with destroying civil liberties, supporting torture, and selling the American public out to corporate interests is by distracting voters with sex scandals.
What amazes me is that supposedly intelligent people, like New York Times columnists, let the Republicans put this over on them twice (with Clinton and again with Spitzer). It's hard to believe that they're so stupid. I wonder if there's another reason.
Spitzer was a victim, BTW, of the indiscriminate financial reporting laws which give the attorney generals indiscriminate power to go after anyone they want, including the other party. The only consolation is that Spitzer played this game himself, so there is a defense of of being hoisted on his own petard.
The criminals must have cased the joint in advance.
So if the store ran their surveillance videos all day and kept the recordings for a while, the perpetrators should appear somewhere on the recordings.
Unless they did something stupid like erase the recordings.
Also, can't they locate those iPhones with triangulation?
It's not ionizing, so that's pretty simple.
It's not ionizing. It's not heat. How do you exclude every other possibility?
Cells are fairly resilient - a small amount of heat isn't that big a deal.
Yes but there are an awful lot of them, and every time they duplicate they make an average of about 8 usually inconsequential errors. The DNA repair mechanisms are in a constant struggle to keep up with the errors. All it takes is 1 cell with 2 or 3 of the wrong mutations and you've got cancer.
Mind you I don't believe that EMF or radio towers cause cancer. I'm swimming in EMF, and I haven't seen anything that would make me worry about it.
But there are some odd blinded controlled studies that found EMF would affect mammalian cells growing in culture, at levels too low to be heat effects and comparable to the levels that power lines emit.
I'm arguing that we can't yet exclude the possibility that EMFs are causing those effects. Of course it might be because the sleep-deprived lab assistant screwed up the cell culture or something (stranger things have happened). It might not be repeatable.
I saw it cited in the IEEE Spectrum article on EMF several years ago. I don't know if anyone tried to replicate it. If other people tried to repeat it and it didn't work, then I'll agree with you that there's no effect.
But if they can repeatedly show an effect in cell culture at EMF levels too low for thermal effect, then the effect of that radiation is an open question, with a mechanism that apparently exists but can't be identified.
Most of the effect on human tissue is heating and in the microwave range.
Yeah, people make calculations assuming that the only effect could be thermal, in which case you're right.
But there could be another mechanism, even one we don't know about yet.
I don't believe low-level electromagnetic radiation is dangerous, but there are studies that show cells grown in culture exposed to low-level radiation had more mutations than unexposed cells. (I forget the details, but I read about it in IEEE Spectrum. )
Cell reproduction is pretty complicated. How do you exclude the possibility that EMF may cause a mutation by an unknown mechanism? My first thought would be to duplicate the experiment and hope it turns out differently. But suppose you can duplicate it?
After all, low-level magnetic fields have biological effects -- birds navigate by them.
I don't think it's true. But I can't exclude it.
You don't need lots of science to test a specific case like the one in question: "does living near an AM tower increase your risk of cancer?" All you need is some reliable data on cancer rates for people who live near one versus those who live far away from one.
Actually you do need a lot of science. You can't assume that the people who are living near the AM tower have the same risks of cancer as the people who are living farther away. Correcting for all the risk factors is damn hard.
For example, take power lines. I used to help a guy work on his hot rods, rebuilding the engine and stuff. Really nice guy, pretty smart, and his Olds really took off, but he was kind of a lower-income working-class guy. His mom's house had power lines in the back. Now comfortable middle-class people with lots of money don't usually live in houses with power lines in the back yard. Poor people are different in lots of ways. They eat different foods. They smoke more cigarettes. They drink more (or at least cheaper) booze. They have less access to health care. If you find that people living next to power lines have more cancer, is it the power lines, or is it the cigarettes? Or is it the asbestos he was inhaling in the place he worked?
You can find studies that show power lines, or radio transmitters, or whatever are associated with all kids of things. But it seems to be (although it isn't certain) that it's because they didn't correct for other factors.
how does it compare to having a cell phone, or really any kind of radio transmitter, or even your neighbor having one... and shouldn't all those things be banned first before we start blowing up radio towers.
Now you're getting there. IEEE Spectrum once did a big article on the hazards of EMF, and the engineers who actually went to peoples' houses with meters reported that the strongest exposure to EMF came from hair dryers, electric shavers and kitchen blenders. So let's ban those things and then blow up radio towers.
The NYPL is doing something similar. President Paul LeClerc got a ton of money from wealthy contributors, and he's de-emphasizing the print collection and boosting the digital collections.
The signature example of that was selling the Donnell Library on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/arts/design/07nypl.html The Donnell was a landmark library for 50 years, that people grew up with, and a magnet for teenage science nerds, poetry fans, etc., from around the City and neighboring suburbs. They had the best collection of science books for children and teenagers I've ever seen, and one of the first record and film collections. LeClerc made a deal with a hotel to tear down the Donnell Library (which he's already done) and build a hotel in its place, with a library half the size in the basement (that part of the deal fell through with the financial crisis). The theory was that the new library wouldn't need as many books, because it would have a big digital collection.
In general, LeClerc is leading the NYPL to build up its digital collection at the expense of the paper collection. This is good in some ways, if I want to look something up in their digital newspaper collection, or some of their digital science and technology journals. It's bad in other ways, since most of the major medical journals I want to read are too expensive for them to subscribe to online. (Most journals charge libraries a fee based on the number of students and faculty in their school, and a NYPL librarian told me that the New England Journal of Medicine would charge them a fee based on the entire population of New York.)
With infinite money (or far enough in the future), a digital collection could be as good as or better than a paper collection for most (but not all) purposes, and might be better overall. But with the money and technology they have now, a digital collection loses an awful lot.
The librarians told me that the Donnell had special collections, such as foreign language collections in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Yiddish (!), and every language they speak in New York -- more languages than Google. When they closed the Donnell, they broke up the collection, and most of the books were just thrown out as garbage. (I once looked up some books from the 1960s in Spanish on Mexican murals. When Isaac Bashevits Singer won the Nobel Prize, I looked up some of his Yiddish short stories and struggled through them with my German and Hebrew.)
In the 1980s, I worked for McGraw-Hill, and one of the best things about that company was that I could use the McGraw-Hill library. McGraw-Hill published about 50 business and technical magazines in the electrical, mining, machining, chemical, aerospace and I forgot what other industries. They had files of trade magazines going back to 1917, with standard reference books for every industry, and a book division with elementary, high school and college textbooks (think Samuelson's Economics), and classic business and technical books. They also had a great journalism collection. The guys who built the electrical industry in the 1930s wrote articles about it for McGraw-Hill magazines. You could stand in front of the bookshelf on that industry and get a good idea of what the industry was all about.
The top management was really pushing computerization. They decided to throw out all the books and magazines and replace them with Nexis and other databases (because the McGraw-Hill magazines were on Nexis, they got a special deal). Realize that this was a publishing company, whose employees had dedicated their lives to books. Instead of getting a book or magazine, all you could get was 20-page printouts (dot matrix, no pictures). We used to refer to it as the Alexandrian Library at McGraw-Hill.
if the library is in fact Digital it can easily be backed up somewhere.
Yes, but it may be backed up on a publisher's server behind a pay for access firewall.
I used to subscribe to the New York Times online for $50 a year, and I could get any article 150 years back -- in other words, any article I ever read in the NYT in my entire life. Then they changed the terms of service, and made the archive free back to (I think) 1980, and then $4 or something an article before then. I'm not going to pay $4 an article, so as far as home access is concerned, it's gone forever.
Science librarians are complaining about that problem. If you subscribe to a print journal, you put it on the shelves and it's there for good. If you subscribe to an online journal, it's accessible only for as long as you subscribe. If the publisher raises his subscription price and your library decides they can't afford it any more, you can't read the old issues any more.
you should be able to get digital copies (manual scans if you have to) of the books you already have
I think Google got the cost of scanning a book down to $1 a page, with some heavily automated expensive equipment.
As I type this comment I have in front of me the 1892 edition of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader. At the foot of page 105 I can read the signature of a Jean Macalister dated March 15 1909.
I picked up a copy of Vergil's Aeneid in a thrift shop for fifty cents. When I got to the part about Dido and Aeneas, there were hearts and flowers drawn in the margin in a feminine hand.
I understand your concern. You're logical and patent law isn't always logical.
A patent lawyer could explain this better than me, but my understanding is that a design patent is very specific, and it only covers designs that are very close to the patented design.
Suppose you got a design patent for a piece of furniture, like a set of drawers with knobs. That design patent would cover drawers with those specific knobs. If you changed the knobs, you wouldn't be violating the design patent.
Any graphic design that didn't look like the patented design wouldn't be covered. If you put a frame around the screen, that would be different enough. You could make the background one color, and the search box a contrasting color. You could make the buttons or the links look different. It has to be graphically different, but the utility can be the same. A design patent can't cover utility. If you can do the same thing in a way that looks different, you're home free.
You raise an interesting objection. Lawyers do make arguments like that. I think that practically, there are so many different ways to design a search screen that, even if hundreds of search companies took design patents on their screens, you could easily come up with another one that wasn't covered by the design patent. It's like saying, "Suppose you got a design patent on every possible T-shirt?"
Notice that Google isn't patenting the function of a search screen. They're only preventing you from using a search screen that imitates the distinctive appearance of their search screen.
If you went to law school you could learn how to be illogical.
That's right.
They have a design patent on a blank screen with a search box in the center of the page, and some buttons and screen furniture as illustrated.
I assume it wouldn't infringe to have a blank page with a search box at the bottom of the page, or with the buttons on the left, etc.
What's a good Windows backup program that I can use to download all my Gmail messages to Thunderbird?
Is a mammoth an elephant?
Not only is the genetics of sexuality complicated, scientists haven't even identified all the genes.
Even worse, they identified a lot of genes that turned out to wrong.
Remember USP9Y? That's the gene that's supposed to be responsible for loss of sperm production in deletions of the AZFa region -- the balls of the AZFa region, as it were.
The New England Journal of Medicine had a report last February of a man who had the whole USP9Y gene deleted, and still was able to produce sperm. In fact, his father had the same USP9Y deletion.
You can divide the genes that determine human sexuality into two groups. One group determines the form that genitals take. The other group determines all the other physical and psychological aspects of sexuality. Conceptually, it's easy to see how someone could develop with female genitals and everything else male. That doesn't mean that anyone has identified it as a syndrome, much less the genes and protein-level mechanisms.
I assume they'll give Caster Semenya a karyotyping, FISH, and test for every known gene involved with sexual development. Maybe they'll find an abnormality, and maybe they won't.
But that won't answer the question. Is somebody female because she has female genitals, XX karyotype, some arbitrary sex-determining genes, female hormones, female body type, or female reproductive ability? Gender is a social construct, not a lab test.
(BTW, I think the New Scientist had an article on this subject of sex tests for athletes a few years ago.)
Maybe this guy.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07312008/news/regionalnews/bar_goons_smash_and_slash_past_122359.htm
The Manhattan doorman charged with hurling glasses at a woman's face at the Hudson Hotel served a month in jail for horribly disfiguring a top model by smashing a bottle across her cheek at a posh club last year.
Samir Dervisevic, 25, got into a drinking-tossing dust-up with model Liskula Cohen at Ultra on West 26th Street on Jan. 14, 2007, that ended when he cracked a bottle of vodka across her face, she tearfully recalled yesterday.
Good point.
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry6p2&Act=2&Scene=1&Scope=scene
History of Henry VI, Part II Act II, Scene 1
Duke of Gloucester. How long hast thou been blind?
Simpcox. Born so, master.
Duke of Gloucester. What, and wouldst climb a tree?
Simpcox. But that in all my life, when I was a youth.
Simpcox's Wife. Too true; and bought his climbing very dear.
Duke of Gloucester. Mass, thou lovedst plums well, that wouldst venture so.
Simpcox. Alas, good master, my wife desired some damsons, And made me climb, with danger of my life.
Duke of Gloucester. A subtle knave! but yet it shall not serve. Let me see thine eyes: wink now: now open them: In my opinion yet thou seest not well.
Simpcox. Yes, master, clear as day, I thank God and Saint Alban.
Duke of Gloucester. Say'st thou me so? What colour is this cloak of?
Simpcox. Red, master; red as blood.
Duke of Gloucester. Why, that's well said. What colour is my gown of?
Simpcox. Black, forsooth: coal-black as jet.
Henry VI. Why, then, thou know'st what colour jet is of?
Earl of Suffolk. And yet, I think, jet did he never see.
Duke of Gloucester. But cloaks and gowns, before this day, a many.
Simpcox's Wife. Never, before this day, in all his life.
Duke of Gloucester. Tell me, sirrah, what's my name?
Simpcox. Alas, master, I know not.
Duke of Gloucester. What's his name?
Simpcox. I know not.
Duke of Gloucester. Nor his?
Simpcox. No, indeed, master.
Duke of Gloucester. What's thine own name?
Simpcox. Saunder Simpcox, an if it please you, master.
Duke of Gloucester. Then, Saunder, sit there, the lyingest knave in Christendom. If thou hadst been born blind, thou mightest as well have known all our names as thus to name the several colours we do wear. Sight may distinguish of colours, but suddenly to nominate them all, it is impossible. My lords, Saint Alban here hath done a miracle; and would ye not think his cunning to be great, that could restore this cripple to his legs again?
"It was literally right next to the hotel security entrance."
Unless all mailboxes come with mandatory cameras these days.
U.S. post offices have security cameras these days. You can't mail anything that weighs >15 ounces without getting photographed, whether you know it or not.
A woman who worked for the Republican Party had an attack of conscience and mailed some documents to the Democrats, in an Express Mail envelope. She was prosecuted for theft, and part of the evidence was the Post Office security cameras. (Although I can't understand why she used Express Mail, where you have to fill out a return address and get a receipt.)
The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/21/2249
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/4/370
However, in these studies, all the subjects had joined the study and given permission in writing for the researchers to use their personal data.
It would clear a lot of things up if we could see the documents that the UMD professor submitted to the university's human subjects review board, and the documents they sent him in reply.
Also a good editorial: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/361/5/522
The big problem is that they finally got a good, cheap, effective, safe drug, artemisin, against the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, but it's becoming resistant.
The reason it's becoming resistant is that people in Pailin, Cambodia were using artemisin alone. If they use it alone, the P. falciparum can develop resistance to it. They're supposed to use it with another drug, like mefloquine, to kill off the parasite with shock and awe, but in some parts of the world they just use artemisin. From Cambodia, it's spreading to the rest of the world. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/361/5/455 And it's all Pailin's fault.
They can zap mosquitoes with radiation and get parasites that don't reproduce and can be used as vaccines, but you had to get bitten by a lot of them to develop immunity that way.
They also have a subunit vaccine in phase III trials, but it's only 65% effective.
That was a pretty cool study design btw -- using chloroquine to arrest the development of P. falciparum while you develop immunity. (Immunity to to P. falciparum takes a while to develop.)
Interesting thing they pointed out in an article that isn't free is that people in the malaria zone give their children aspirin to reduce the fever (most malaria deaths are children). But aspirin is an anti-platelet agent, and platelets stick to red blood cells to kill off the ones that are infected with the parasite. When the aspirin lowers the platelet activity, the parasite is more likely to survive inside the red blood cell.