I spent oh so many misspent hours playing with the Bally Professional Arcade
system, also called the Bally Astrocade. It had a
pistol grip joystick and the resolution and speed was so far superior to the much
more popular Atari systems that came out later.
A great example of poor
marketing and or timing, I guess. I have yet to meet anyone else who played
this system 30 years later...
Obviously, it should not matter if you are an individual or an institutional scientist and the science should stand on its own merits. Unfortunately, the signal to noise ratio of quality papers coming from non affiliated individual submitters is probably bad enough that most journal editors would rather not take the time or risk to send your work out for peer review. (Think of all the perpetual motion machine crackpots out there still). In most fields, peer review is a voluntary system of review for which reviewers are not compensated and requires substantial effort, so editors are loathe to ask volunteers to review a suspect manuscript fearing it will poison reviewers to subsequent inquires.
Practically though, one way to look more credible is to incorporate (this is inexpensive in most states) and submit it corresponding from the corporation. Another strategy is to find a co-author at a research institution. This may be difficult because academics in my department get a surprising number of calls like this from people who are usually either disturbed or obviously idiotic. But most academics I know will take these calls, especially the younger ones. They might be able to check your work from a different perspective and can certainly help with the arcane apects of manuscript preparation, tone and format.
"Acknowledgments We thank Anne-Laure Afchain for her help in statistical analyses, and the CRIIGEN scientific and administrative councils for expertise, and initiating judiciary actions by the former French minister of environment, Corinne Lepage, to obtain the data. We also thank Frederique Baudoin for secretarial assistance, and Dr. Brian John and Ian Panton for advising on the English revision of the manuscript. This work was supported by Greenpeace Germany who, in June 2005, won the Appeal Court action against Monsanto, who wanted to keep the data confidential. We acknowledge the French Ministry of Research and the member of Parliament François Grosdidier for a contract to study health assessments of GMOs, as well as the support of Carrefour Group, Quality, Responsibility and Risk Management."
Supported by Greenpeace...I love the organization, but there is a possible stigma of bias here. Like big tobacco funding studies scientists likely to do research that favors their cause....
Yes, but the point is that Rove supplied the CIA link, which enabled the subsequent "outing" of a CIA agent. It is unlikely that he didn't know what he was doing when he disclosed the career information considering Rove's long history of leekage (See the documentary 'Bush's Brain')
Ah typical academics! (I am one I should know). What would the be done with the tons of flesh dissolving sodium hydroxide by-product generated as part of this fuel cell? How would the sodium hydroxide be contained in the event of an accident? Sodium hydroxide is extremely hazardous stuff and that's not lye.
What I worry most about I recombinant art and culture is homogenization.
In culture, art, music -let's just call them 'memes' after Richard Dawkins- recombination does combine the traits of parents and selects for the "best" progeny. But let's extend the metaphor. If you take a population of individuals, close it and allow recombination, the population will eventually become genetically homogenous. In isolation, populations will evolve into their ecological niche and then over time homogenize. This is what causes speciation, the creation of species, and is why all finches look alike on a remote island in the Galapagos. In this way, isolation breeds diversity.
But now, due to the digital revolution, the boundaries are ripped down, recombination is vastly accelerated and art and music evolve on a planetary scale. The whole planet is one island. This is cool now, but if you extrapolate it somewhat it could get really boring. We could all become (meme wise) one boring brown finch. Music will stop evolving. It sometimes seems to me that now all bands sound derivative, if not exactly the same, as bands 10 years ago. Similarly for literature, art and ideas.
Question is: will recombination eventually end art by making it homogenous, or at best, a viral mimetically homogenous recapitulation of what has already been?
We're getting to understand bacteria and virus quite well. In my lab (and many others) we are able to package our DNA into virus particle coats and use it to transfect other organisms. You can buy a kit from Stratagene (SupeCos) for this very purpose! We "program" organisms by adding synthtic DNA sequences, or cut and past sequences. We also use something called "directed evolution" to evolve enzyme that do non-natural things.
I can imagine a day when we are able to build other bio nano structures using similar methods. I've seen talks with people "printing" neurons on chips, for instance.
There is a common misconception about nanotechnology that even/. editors are not immune to. I suppose this has to do with the fact that nanotechnology has morphed over the years into a discpline that has very little to do with "nanofabrication" and nanomachines, areas in which research has slowed substantially since the early 90s.
Rather, most academic research is now geared towards the production of highly controlled materials at the nano-scale. Nanoparticulate metals and oxides have tons of applications but almost none of them are nano machines. Rather, this work has become advanced form of materials chemistry and physics, designing regular surface features or particles. For this reason, nano-materials are not going to be much more dangerous than normal materials in the big picture. Nano-disperse carbon, which is sometimes called *smoke* or soot, is probably just as toxic as bucky-balls.
An interesting issue is: why have researches have abandoned nano-machines? I think it has to do with the fact that we already know how to build them. There's technology that has a great track record and can do almost anything you'd like at the nano and sub nano scale. They're called *enzymes* and recent enzyme engineering advances have made many nano-related tasks kind of superfluous. Also there are viruses and bacteria(maybe) that range into the nano-scale as well. So I think it boils down to a "why bother" issue with nano machines.
Of course I *might* be biased given my chosen area of research. I'm a chem. Prof investigating enzyme and bacteria engineering. Nah, I'm not biased.....
Scientists are often right at predicting physical outcomes. Who'd have thought that all that "relativity" mumbo jumbo actually worked? Of course it did for atomic theory and nuclear bombs? When people criticize scientific "theories" for being useless because "they are just theories" I can't help but think of atomic theory and the politicization of science. When science is politicized, as it was with Nuclear physics, (and as it is now with Climate), disasters occur.
I am an assistant prof at a major research institution and $1,000,000 is not as much as you would imagine.
Firstly most universities take ~ 50% of grants immediately as overhead. You're down to 500K.
Second this is spread out over 4 - 5 years, now you're down to about 125 K a year.
Third, if we have grants we profs are required to pay our own summer salaries. On average this could be 25K, so you're down to 100 k/ year.
In sciece and engineering we are expected to pay our grad-students if we have grants. Yearly salary with additional overhead (in the US, Canada is a bit less) comes to almost 50K/year
A post-doctoral researcher would be hard to find for less than 50K/year with overhead.
So really it supports a grad student and a post-doc and maybe some equipment for four years.
Compared to the resources of industry it sometimes seems kind of puny. But the freedom is worth it.
Just some info,
OBQT
I am a Chemical Biologist (PhD) and specialize in the chemistry of natural products. Natural products are compounds made by living organisms. Examples include penicillin (made by a mold and a bacteria), erythromycin (made by a soil bacteria), and taxol (anticancer compound made by a Yew tree). The thing I question about MCS syndrome is the fact that we are surrounded by varying environmental toxins continually.
For example, soil contains tens of thousands known carcinogens. Furthermore, these bacteria are very mutable and are constantly evolving chemical structural variants and the like. The very "smell" of soil is caused by a compound called geosmin, a terpenoid compound. Complex bioactive chemicals are everywhere and produced at fairly high levels. It is difficult for me to understand why man-made chemicals would be any more dangerous or insulting to a human immune system than natural product molecules. Nature makes more nasty molecules with greater constantly varying structural variety than any chemical factory or synthetic chemist could ever hope to make.
If MCS is real, there should be no solace for people afflicted with it, short of moving into a granite cube filled with synthetically synthesized, purified air.
Slashdot Mirror
...welcome our Red Rain daughter cell overlords.
I spent oh so many misspent hours playing with the Bally Professional Arcade system, also called the Bally Astrocade. It had a pistol grip joystick and the resolution and speed was so far superior to the much more popular Atari systems that came out later.
A great example of poor marketing and or timing, I guess. I have yet to meet anyone else who played this system 30 years later...
Note, I am a career academic scientist.
Obviously, it should not matter if you are an individual or an institutional scientist and the science should stand on its own merits. Unfortunately, the signal to noise ratio of quality papers coming from non affiliated individual submitters is probably bad enough that most journal editors would rather not take the time or risk to send your work out for peer review. (Think of all the perpetual motion machine crackpots out there still). In most fields, peer review is a voluntary system of review for which reviewers are not compensated and requires substantial effort, so editors are loathe to ask volunteers to review a suspect manuscript fearing it will poison reviewers to subsequent inquires.
Practically though, one way to look more credible is to incorporate (this is inexpensive in most states) and submit it corresponding from the corporation. Another strategy is to find a co-author at a research institution. This may be difficult because academics in my department get a surprising number of calls like this from people who are usually either disturbed or obviously idiotic. But most academics I know will take these calls, especially the younger ones. They might be able to check your work from a different perspective and can certainly help with the arcane apects of manuscript preparation, tone and format.
IAMB (I'm a molecular biologist) and I just read the paper online. Not a horrible study, but not terribly conclusive. Check the Acknowlegment:
8 04/?p=9a49e2d215844a92a26a8eec3e8e4467&pi=0
http://www.springerlink.com/content/02648wu132m07
"Acknowledgments We thank Anne-Laure Afchain for her help in statistical analyses, and the CRIIGEN scientific and administrative councils for expertise, and initiating judiciary actions by the former French minister of environment, Corinne Lepage, to obtain the data. We also thank Frederique Baudoin for secretarial assistance, and Dr. Brian John and Ian Panton for advising on the English revision of the manuscript. This work was supported by Greenpeace Germany who, in June 2005, won the Appeal Court action against Monsanto, who wanted to keep the data confidential. We acknowledge the French Ministry of Research and the member of Parliament François Grosdidier for a contract to study health assessments of GMOs, as well as the support of Carrefour Group, Quality, Responsibility and Risk Management."
Supported by Greenpeace...I love the organization, but there is a possible stigma of bias here. Like big tobacco funding studies scientists likely to do research that favors their cause....
Douglas Adams would be rolling on the floor upon hearing that there was a bar at the center of the galaxy...
Yes, but the point is that Rove supplied the CIA link, which enabled the subsequent "outing" of a CIA agent. It is unlikely that he didn't know what he was doing when he disclosed the career information considering Rove's long history of leekage (See the documentary 'Bush's Brain')
Ah typical academics! (I am one I should know). What would the be done with the tons of flesh dissolving sodium hydroxide by-product generated as part of this fuel cell? How would the sodium hydroxide be contained in the event of an accident? Sodium hydroxide is extremely hazardous stuff and that's not lye.
What I worry most about I recombinant art and culture is homogenization.
In culture, art, music -let's just call them 'memes' after Richard Dawkins- recombination does combine the traits of parents and selects for the "best" progeny. But let's extend the metaphor. If you take a population of individuals, close it and allow recombination, the population will eventually become genetically homogenous. In isolation, populations will evolve into their ecological niche and then over time homogenize. This is what causes speciation, the creation of species, and is why all finches look alike on a remote island in the Galapagos. In this way, isolation breeds diversity.
But now, due to the digital revolution, the boundaries are ripped down, recombination is vastly accelerated and art and music evolve on a planetary scale. The whole planet is one island. This is cool now, but if you extrapolate it somewhat it could get really boring. We could all become (meme wise) one boring brown finch. Music will stop evolving. It sometimes seems to me that now all bands sound derivative, if not exactly the same, as bands 10 years ago. Similarly for literature, art and ideas.
Question is: will recombination eventually end art by making it homogenous, or at best, a viral mimetically homogenous recapitulation of what has already been?
We're getting to understand bacteria and virus quite well. In my lab (and many others) we are able to package our DNA into virus particle coats and use it to transfect other organisms. You can buy a kit from Stratagene (SupeCos) for this very purpose! We "program" organisms by adding synthtic DNA sequences, or cut and past sequences. We also use something called "directed evolution" to evolve enzyme that do non-natural things.
I can imagine a day when we are able to build other bio nano structures using similar methods. I've seen talks with people "printing" neurons on chips, for instance.
Cheers!
-obqt
There is a common misconception about nanotechnology that even /. editors are not immune to. I suppose this has to do with the fact that nanotechnology has morphed over the years into a discpline that has very little to do with "nanofabrication" and nanomachines, areas in which research has slowed substantially since the early 90s.
Rather, most academic research is now geared towards the production of highly controlled materials at the nano-scale. Nanoparticulate metals and oxides have tons of applications but almost none of them are nano machines. Rather, this work has become advanced form of materials chemistry and physics, designing regular surface features or particles. For this reason, nano-materials are not going to be much more dangerous than normal materials in the big picture. Nano-disperse carbon, which is sometimes called *smoke* or soot, is probably just as toxic as bucky-balls.
An interesting issue is: why have researches have abandoned nano-machines? I think it has to do with the fact that we already know how to build them. There's technology that has a great track record and can do almost anything you'd like at the nano and sub nano scale. They're called *enzymes* and recent enzyme engineering advances have made many nano-related tasks kind of superfluous. Also there are viruses and bacteria(maybe) that range into the nano-scale as well. So I think it boils down to a "why bother" issue with nano machines.
Of course I *might* be biased given my chosen area of research. I'm a chem. Prof investigating enzyme and bacteria engineering. Nah, I'm not biased.....
Scientists are often right at predicting physical outcomes. Who'd have thought that all that "relativity" mumbo jumbo actually worked? Of course it did for atomic theory and nuclear bombs? When people criticize scientific "theories" for being useless because "they are just theories" I can't help but think of atomic theory and the politicization of science. When science is politicized, as it was with Nuclear physics, (and as it is now with Climate), disasters occur.
p hp
OBQT
Speaking of politicization of science:
http://scientistsandengineersforchange.org/index.
I am an assistant prof at a major research institution and $1,000,000 is not as much as you would imagine. Firstly most universities take ~ 50% of grants immediately as overhead. You're down to 500K. Second this is spread out over 4 - 5 years, now you're down to about 125 K a year. Third, if we have grants we profs are required to pay our own summer salaries. On average this could be 25K, so you're down to 100 k/ year. In sciece and engineering we are expected to pay our grad-students if we have grants. Yearly salary with additional overhead (in the US, Canada is a bit less) comes to almost 50K/year A post-doctoral researcher would be hard to find for less than 50K/year with overhead. So really it supports a grad student and a post-doc and maybe some equipment for four years. Compared to the resources of industry it sometimes seems kind of puny. But the freedom is worth it. Just some info, OBQT
I am a Chemical Biologist (PhD) and specialize in the chemistry of natural products. Natural products are compounds made by living organisms. Examples include penicillin (made by a mold and a bacteria), erythromycin (made by a soil bacteria), and taxol (anticancer compound made by a Yew tree). The thing I question about MCS syndrome is the fact that we are surrounded by varying environmental toxins continually.
For example, soil contains tens of thousands known carcinogens. Furthermore, these bacteria are very mutable and are constantly evolving chemical structural variants and the like. The very "smell" of soil is caused by a compound called geosmin, a terpenoid compound. Complex bioactive chemicals are everywhere and produced at fairly high levels. It is difficult for me to understand why man-made chemicals would be any more dangerous or insulting to a human immune system than natural product molecules. Nature makes more nasty molecules with greater constantly varying structural variety than any chemical factory or synthetic chemist could ever hope to make.
If MCS is real, there should be no solace for people afflicted with it, short of moving into a granite cube filled with synthetically synthesized, purified air.