I'll put my cards on the table and say I'm only a casual contributor to Wikipedia, and I'm really excited about Citizendium. I've read the public documentation on the project and am planning on checking out the mailing list. I may or may not end up joining the project, but I'm really looking forward to it launching and hopefully gaining steam.
That said, I think I'm less critical than you are about Wikipedia. I'm really impressed by the project, and it's my go-to source for information. It's not perfect and maybe Citizendium has the potential to be better, but I think it's really, really great. I do understand how an insider can get disillusioned by Wikipedia politics (I've heard stories), but the project has produced a fine product in my view.
Moving beyond what we each think of each encyclopedia, I do think it's important to note that it's tough to predict how Citizendium will turn out. Arguably, the changes Sanger envisions for Citizendium could impact the very causes of Wikipedia's success.
Building a community is pretty tough; it requires just the right combination of technology and rules and people. And while it's been clear that [online] communities are at the core of many of the most interesting things on the Internet, we're still at the very early stages of understanding what it is that makes them work.
But Wikipedia isn't even a typical community. Usually Internet communities are groups of people who come together to discuss something, like cryptography or the writing of a technical specification. Perhaps they meet in an IRC channel, a web forum, a newsgroup, or on a mailing list, but the focus is always something "out there", something outside the discussion itself.
But with Wikipedia, the goal is building Wikipedia. It's not a community set up to make some other thing, it's a community set up to make itself. And since Wikipedia was one of the first sites to do it, we know hardly anything about building communities like that.
It could be that the ability to contribute anonymously leads to some significant content contributions, and that the lack of any formal hierarchy leads to more motivated contributors. I'm not necessarily arguing that it does, but that it could Wikipedia is a functioning project which has produced something truly epic in scope. Citizendium is still just a plan in some peoples' heads. I guess my point is that, for all its flaws, Wikipedia is pretty neat, that when we speak of it we should at least give it some credit, and that maybe there are deep psychological-motivational issues to keep in mind while building an online encyclopedia, which Citizendium may or may not be dealing with well (i.e. how anonymous contribution and hierarchy stuff may lead to more contributions).
I'll look forward to seeing Citizendium in action.
I don't think Yau is out of options, though. If his character is being unfairly criticized, he's famous enough that he should be able to get some public show of support from the mathematics community. I think it's pretty common that scientists stick up for their own against unfair press.
If, however, the article was right and it's understood that he tends toward glory-stealing and conniving power-plays, he won't be able to get a show of support.
So, I appreciate your general point, but I feel that in this case it's not quite a catch-22.
How will it confuse people? What will it confuse them about?
The PR tug-of-war between two similar wiki-based encyclopedias may cause some confusion. I can't speak specifically to how this might happen, since the first salvo has only just been fired.
What Sanger is counting on is that the Citizendium will attract the large community of experts and people who care about accuracy who have already been driven away from Wikipedia - because it [Wikipedia] neither cares about nor makes any attempt to retain either kind of person. In fact, to some degree the Wikipedia is openly hostile to both types of people.
Three quick points- one, you're right in that this is Sanger's explicit wish. Two, I think it's very likely this project will draw existing wikipedians to it. Third, I think you may be unfairly stereotyping Wikipedia. Those hostile tendencies toward experts do exist, but to say they dominate Wikipedia is a pretty strong assertion.
Why is [preventing non-credentialed people from contributing] bad? I personally have no problem with non experts being prevented from contributing. The importance and value of an encyclopedia lies in its completeness and authoritativenes, not its eglatarianism.
This is the million-dollar question. I think Wikipedia benefits from accepting contribution from a very wide set of people. In fact, the majority of content is generated by them- have you read http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia ?
If some of that broad audience moves to Citizendium and can't contribute, that could be bad.
Citizendium has a lot going for it as a project. And it's definitely worth doing. But it has some potential side-effects (as I've argued) and nobody really knows how things'll turn out- untested social are pretty darn unpredictable. Larry Sanger, for instance, has commented that "[Wikipedia] is a project that shouldn't work, but does." Maybe Citizendium is a project that should work, but doesn't.
I'm not being a critic of Citizendium. I just think it's an interesting situation.
I do think this fork is a mixed bag. On one hand, it's another editing model, and that's great. The more the merrier, because it allows us to see what works. Any a priori theory of what results a new editing model we have is probably going to be flawed: just look at what people were predicting for wikipedia back a few years. And if this project draws new experts into the online encyclopedia fold- people who wouldn't be involved save for this project- that's great too.
On the other, this is going to confuse a lot of people, and might take manpower away from Wikipedia. Wikipedia works so well because the community is so large- anything that draws people, especially experts and those who care about accuracy, away from the project could be pretty rough.
I find myself wondering how this Citizendium will deal with identifying experts and handling contributions- if it draws readers away from Wikipedia, and prevents most of them from contributing because they're not "experts", that's bad.
FTP: "The scientists propose that several centuries ago, a histiocyte cell in a dog or a wolf turned cancerous. A mutation may have caused the cell to become abnormal--perhaps that LINE-1 element that marks Sticker's sarcoma cells today. But natural selection would have favored other mutations as well that allowed its descendants to become more effective at growing into a tumor. During mating, some of the cancer cells managed to spread to the dog's partner, where they could continue to proliferate."
It's pretty freaky that some ancient dog has essentially turned into a contagious cancer. Not the fate I'd choose...
You're right- those methods do center on comparing populations. It's not clear from my previous post how useful those methods would be if we only had one data point for one of the populations.
But one of the stumbling blocks the scientists in this initial decode had to deal with was convincing museums that valuable research would come out of giving them Neanderthal bones to grind up and analyze. If things go as planned, I think it'll be easier for them to ask for more samples. And we've a fair number of random Neanderthal jawbones and such scattered around museums.:)
But even with only one data point, it isn't so much that there are one or two techniques for analyzing the Neanderthal genome, and if they come back ambiguous, that's that. This sequence data is being posted online, and every trick in the book will be used and cross-correlated against every other trick in the book. There are a lot of tricks to pull out if you have a relatively full genome to work with.
My prediction is that, within 6-8 years, there will be a real scientific consensus on how much, if any, genetic material modern humans inherited from Neanderthals. I'd note that estimates run as high as 5%, which is pretty significant in a lot of contexts.
Something I've never heard explained: How exactly can we determine the specific origin of an allele of a gene?
Even if an allele is found only in modern Europeans, and is also found in a Neandertal sample, how would we know where it originated? It could have been a mutation that happened 40,000 years ago in Europe, but how do we know which population produced it?
That's a good question. From breaking it down into 'when did an allele arise' and 'where did an allele arise' here some examples of how we can answer (geneticists are often very clever about this and this isn't an exhaustive list):
When the gene entered a given gene pool: 1. Linkage disequilibrium: DNA recombination takes big 'chunks' of DNA from each parent to make their child's DNA. In the long-term, DNA is inherited at the gene level; in the medium and short-term, DNA is inherited in 50-100 kilobase chunks.
We can quantify how much time has passed since our gene entered a gene pool by checking the genes near our gene on its chromosome. If not much time has passed- if recombination hasn't had time to shuffle the genetic deck since our gene entered the gene pool- we'll find that people with our gene will have the same genes nearby.
2. Number of mutations by which our gene differs from person to person: if there's many, the gene is old (this won't work for some genes, because they're under heavy purifying selection).
Where (rather, which population did the first gene arise in): 1. Which populations have the most ancesteral versions of the gene- it's likely that populations where the gene didn't arise will have only a few versions of the gene due to the "founder effect".
2. Which populations have the highest distribution of the gene, and how homozygous the population is for that gene.
And, of course, combinations of these and analyzing these in terms of known historical events.
So, if we get the Neanderthal genome and humans and Neanderthals share gene X, we can check whether it entered the human or Neanderthal gene pool first.
Here's some background that isn't apparent from the article. The CNN piece talks about Neanderthals in the context of understanding brain evolution, but the million dollar question- in most scientists' minds- is whether Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred, after 500,000 years of separation. It seems at least possible: lions and tigers produce fertile offspring and they diverged 2 million years ago. As the New York Times states,
"A longstanding dispute among archaeologists is whether the modern humans who first entered Europe 45,000 years ago, ultimately from Africa, interbred with the Neanderthals or forced them into extinction. Interbreeding could have been genetically advantageous to the incoming humans, says Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, because the Neanderthals were well adapted to the cold European climate -- the last ice age had another 35,000 years to run -- and to local diseases.
Evidence from the human genome suggests some interbreeding with an archaic species, Dr. Lahn said, which could have been Neanderthals or other early humans."
Now, nobody really knows much at this point. But something that I found interesting was that, via John Hawks, "Neandertals will be within the human range of variation for most genes." And the "pilot experiments" Rothberg mentioned is a reference to how their team sequenced the DNA of the cave bear as a test-run. As I understand it this was mostly to convince museums that grinding up some of their prize Neanderthal fossils in the name of research was a good idea.:)
It's true that the materials we need- to live and to build things from- do not naturally occur in space.
However, there are some pretty amazing materials science advances in the pipeline. I think you're discounting advances in science here- take a look at what people have been coming up with for NASA's "extract oxygen from moondust" contest.
It might take a while, sure, but once this field really gets going (and if it's clear we *need* this to happen) it'll surprise you how quickly things develop.
Re:I wonder where you approach the limit.....
on
The Physics of Superman
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You've got to think that somewhere in the world atheletes are training using high-G centerfuges. For better or worse, legal or illegal, it'd be effective.
Yeah. And perhaps more important than the funding, many of the brightest physicists are going into String Theory- which, if it does turn out to be a dead-end, is a *lot* of waste, no matter the silver lining.
ichin4's comment further down the page was rather insightful.
It's not stating that Google runs bistbuy.com. It is stating that the people who do run the site use Google Ads to make money, which makes Google money. And since Google must accept your use of their ad service, Google is promoting this sort of behavior.
My apologize if my meaning was a bit vague in saying "Nothing appears to link bistbuy.com (if it ever was a valid destination) to Google." I didn't mean to imply Google ran bistbuy.com, but that the Post's reporting was subpar, for the two reasons mentioned in this comment's cousin- I thought the story seemed a bit biased against Google, and there was no effort (via any of the several technological means available) made to perserve the now-ethereal evidence the story cites.
I suppose one could argue, firstly, that we should hold Google up to a higher standard, as the largest actor in this market and one who has a special parked-domain advertising service. And secondly, that the Post's reporters aren't computer wizzes and we should give them a pass on the "whoops, the domain mentioned in the article, and our main piece of evidence, disappeared" thing.
But the first is not mentioned in the article, and I don't think excusing the second will lead to better journalism in the future.
The date of the story was what, the 30th? Cut them some slack.
I saw that- domaindoorman could have pulled the domain if they got wind of the story before it was published. Ideally the Post would have used archive.org to spider the page before they even wrote the story.
However, I don't think we need cut a national newspaper much slack if they run what could be considered a smear job (they single out Google as somehow 'behind' this practice, which is an odd and vague allegation) and the only evidence they cite is, upon inspection, gone.
The Post claims, "Google Inc., which runs the largest ad network on the Internet, is making millions of dollars a year by filling otherwise unused Web sites with ads. In many instances, these ad-filled pages appear when users mistype an Internet address, such as 'BistBuy.com.'"
I also couldn't open bistbuy.com --
Here's what searching whois for bistbuy.com gave me
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the.com and.net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/ for detailed information.
I'd be surprised if anything really unique or surprising came out of the project.
I'd agree, with two caveats: this project might attract some math prodigy that isn't working on these problems (Ramanujan, anyone?). Also, this project will help a lot of people learn how to think about the most abstract parts of mathematics.
The possibility of either result would justify this project in my eyes.
I'm not sure the Shannon Limit need be broken here.
Think about how much redundancy is in even a single standard MP3 file, for instance-- the individual frames are compressed (including huffman compression) but *none of the musical similarities between each MP3 frame are used to compress the file*. That's a lot of unused order.
Theoretically, compressing the first two minutes of an MP3 should result in a much smaller filesize than compressing the first minute and second minute separately. With GZ it doesn't. GZ is definitely not the final word in compression.
That said, I don't expect this company to ship any product.
p.s. If I have my facts wrong, I'd love to be corrected. It's been a little while since I looked into MP3 and GZ.
I can't say myself whether this hypothesis is True or False (I doubt things are precisely as the interviewee stated), but there is some amount of (admittedly circumstantial) evidence for EM effects on health. http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57488,00 .html was the quickest link I could drag up.
Aside from what facts are known, though, I don't believe your arguments speak directly to the issue at hand, that *in theory* household EM fields could negatively impact health.
1. If it were true you'd expect stronger fields to make a bigger effect than miniscule ones.
2. Therefore driving past a 500,000 watt radio or TV transmitting antenna should cause much much much greater symptoms than a 0.0000001 watt emissions from "dirty power". No such effect.
Three responses: 1. A one-time exposure to a high-wattage transmission tower is qualitatively different from chronic exposure to EM fields.
2. Your 500,000 watt figure for radio stations is on the absolute high end (afaik only WBCT-FM is allowed that figure under certain circumstances) but valid; your.0000001 watt figure is definitely not. Cell phones, for instance, are around the 1 watt range (http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6602_7-5020357-1.htm l?tag=nav has various SARs, which is decently close to raw wattage numbers)
3. Intensity varies inversely with the square of the distance (or cube of the distance, roughly, if there are many absorbtive materials between you and the transmission). This quickly minimizes exposure from transmission towers but does little for chronic EM exposure in a home.
3. People that are exposed to high EM fields, such as airport workers, tower light replacers, cell site testers, plasma physicists, industrial RF welders, TV technicians, walkie-talkie testers, they should all be really sick. Like 100,000 time ssicker than the average Joe or Jane Doe. They're not.
These hypothesized negative reactions to EM fields are statistical. Consider that it took quite a long while to gather enough evidence to prove that smoking is quite unhealthy.
4. At the neurological level, the voltage spikes from your nerves are 1,000's of times a bigger EM field than anything from outside your body. It's hard to imagine how a signal that's much weaker than your nerve impulses can have a noticeable effect.
Nobody knows how EM fields affect the body-- but there are plenty of solid, scientific ways that they *could*. One way is through catalyzing reactions involving iron via oscillating EM fields (and hey, there's a whole field emerging in chemistry that specializes in this). Another is by imparting vibrational, rotational, or other types of energy to molecules, which could lead to changes in protein shape.
5. EM fields includes light, particularly sunlight. Sunlight hits you with almost 1,000 watts per square meter, many powers of ten greater than any other EM field, and most people think sunlight feels *good*, not bad.
Sunlight's energy distribution (and, speaking to the point made in the article, lack of oscillation) is completely different than that of man-made EM fields. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field significantly filters anything that makes it down to us.
There's no basic theoretical problem with the concept of statistically hazardous EM fields. It's definitely worth looking into, all things considered.
You consider 5-10 Watts of power over several hours to be 'minimal amounts'? What kind of crack are you smoking?
First ranked result: "The specific energy absorption rate (SAR) varied between 0.016 and 5 W/kg"
"The results show albumin leakage in 5 of 62 of the controls and in 56 of 184 of the animals exposed to 915 MHz microwaves."
"The frequency of occurrence of extravasates (26%) was found to be independent of SAR for SAR [greater than] 2.5 W/kg"
In other words, even a minimal amount of radiation negatively affected the BBB in a significant number of cases, though past 2.5 W/kg rates do increase.
Second ranked result: "The CWdashpulse power varied from 0.001 W to 10 W and the exposure time from 2 min to 960 min."
"The frequency of pathological rats is significantly increased (p As far as I can tell, you just made the "5-10 Watts" comment up.
Next time, paste a link to an actual study. I don't want you pasting another search and claim that 'oh you just missed the ones that supported me.'
Two out of the three pre-results from Google Scholar pertained to our discussion (I should have specified); more if one searches GS directly. Here's a link to what I'm talking about-
I agree. Perhaps I should have phrased my statement, "I'm not aware of any negative attempts at reproduction, after a cursory search of the literature."
Googling for 'blood brain barrier rats radiation watts' for instance turns up a few studies which seem to support this finding.
Of course, rats' BBB and humans' BBB are significantly different.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll put my cards on the table and say I'm only a casual contributor to Wikipedia, and I'm really excited about Citizendium. I've read the public documentation on the project and am planning on checking out the mailing list. I may or may not end up joining the project, but I'm really looking forward to it launching and hopefully gaining steam.
That said, I think I'm less critical than you are about Wikipedia. I'm really impressed by the project, and it's my go-to source for information. It's not perfect and maybe Citizendium has the potential to be better, but I think it's really, really great. I do understand how an insider can get disillusioned by Wikipedia politics (I've heard stories), but the project has produced a fine product in my view.
Moving beyond what we each think of each encyclopedia, I do think it's important to note that it's tough to predict how Citizendium will turn out. Arguably, the changes Sanger envisions for Citizendium could impact the very causes of Wikipedia's success.
Aaron Swartz has said,
It could be that the ability to contribute anonymously leads to some significant content contributions, and that the lack of any formal hierarchy leads to more motivated contributors. I'm not necessarily arguing that it does, but that it could Wikipedia is a functioning project which has produced something truly epic in scope. Citizendium is still just a plan in some peoples' heads. I guess my point is that, for all its flaws, Wikipedia is pretty neat, that when we speak of it we should at least give it some credit, and that maybe there are deep psychological-motivational issues to keep in mind while building an online encyclopedia, which Citizendium may or may not be dealing with well (i.e. how anonymous contribution and hierarchy stuff may lead to more contributions).
I'll look forward to seeing Citizendium in action.
I think you make a fantastic point.
I don't think Yau is out of options, though. If his character is being unfairly criticized, he's famous enough that he should be able to get some public show of support from the mathematics community. I think it's pretty common that scientists stick up for their own against unfair press.
If, however, the article was right and it's understood that he tends toward glory-stealing and conniving power-plays, he won't be able to get a show of support.
So, I appreciate your general point, but I feel that in this case it's not quite a catch-22.
In my mind, yes. Using these kinds of tactics is precisely what the New Yorker accused Yau of doing.
The PR tug-of-war between two similar wiki-based encyclopedias may cause some confusion. I can't speak specifically to how this might happen, since the first salvo has only just been fired.
Three quick points- one, you're right in that this is Sanger's explicit wish. Two, I think it's very likely this project will draw existing wikipedians to it. Third, I think you may be unfairly stereotyping Wikipedia. Those hostile tendencies toward experts do exist, but to say they dominate Wikipedia is a pretty strong assertion.
This is the million-dollar question. I think Wikipedia benefits from accepting contribution from a very wide set of people. In fact, the majority of content is generated by them- have you read http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia ?
If some of that broad audience moves to Citizendium and can't contribute, that could be bad.
Citizendium has a lot going for it as a project. And it's definitely worth doing. But it has some potential side-effects (as I've argued) and nobody really knows how things'll turn out- untested social are pretty darn unpredictable. Larry Sanger, for instance, has commented that "[Wikipedia] is a project that shouldn't work, but does." Maybe Citizendium is a project that should work, but doesn't.
I'm not being a critic of Citizendium. I just think it's an interesting situation.
Interesting comment.
I do think this fork is a mixed bag. On one hand, it's another editing model, and that's great. The more the merrier, because it allows us to see what works. Any a priori theory of what results a new editing model we have is probably going to be flawed: just look at what people were predicting for wikipedia back a few years. And if this project draws new experts into the online encyclopedia fold- people who wouldn't be involved save for this project- that's great too.
On the other, this is going to confuse a lot of people, and might take manpower away from Wikipedia. Wikipedia works so well because the community is so large- anything that draws people, especially experts and those who care about accuracy, away from the project could be pretty rough.
I find myself wondering how this Citizendium will deal with identifying experts and handling contributions- if it draws readers away from Wikipedia, and prevents most of them from contributing because they're not "experts", that's bad.
Carl Zimmer has a great post on this:
g _lives_on_inside_new.php
http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/08/09/an_old_do
FTP:
"The scientists propose that several centuries ago, a histiocyte cell in a dog or a wolf turned cancerous. A mutation may have caused the cell to become abnormal--perhaps that LINE-1 element that marks Sticker's sarcoma cells today. But natural selection would have favored other mutations as well that allowed its descendants to become more effective at growing into a tumor. During mating, some of the cancer cells managed to spread to the dog's partner, where they could continue to proliferate."
It's pretty freaky that some ancient dog has essentially turned into a contagious cancer. Not the fate I'd choose...
You're right- those methods do center on comparing populations. It's not clear from my previous post how useful those methods would be if we only had one data point for one of the populations.
:)
But one of the stumbling blocks the scientists in this initial decode had to deal with was convincing museums that valuable research would come out of giving them Neanderthal bones to grind up and analyze. If things go as planned, I think it'll be easier for them to ask for more samples. And we've a fair number of random Neanderthal jawbones and such scattered around museums.
But even with only one data point, it isn't so much that there are one or two techniques for analyzing the Neanderthal genome, and if they come back ambiguous, that's that. This sequence data is being posted online, and every trick in the book will be used and cross-correlated against every other trick in the book. There are a lot of tricks to pull out if you have a relatively full genome to work with.
My prediction is that, within 6-8 years, there will be a real scientific consensus on how much, if any, genetic material modern humans inherited from Neanderthals. I'd note that estimates run as high as 5%, which is pretty significant in a lot of contexts.
Cheers,
RD
Something I've never heard explained: How exactly can we determine the specific origin of an allele of a gene?
Even if an allele is found only in modern Europeans, and is also found in a Neandertal sample, how would we know where it originated? It could have been a mutation that happened 40,000 years ago in Europe, but how do we know which population produced it?
That's a good question. From breaking it down into 'when did an allele arise' and 'where did an allele arise' here some examples of how we can answer (geneticists are often very clever about this and this isn't an exhaustive list):
When the gene entered a given gene pool:
1. Linkage disequilibrium: DNA recombination takes big 'chunks' of DNA from each parent to make their child's DNA. In the long-term, DNA is inherited at the gene level; in the medium and short-term, DNA is inherited in 50-100 kilobase chunks.
We can quantify how much time has passed since our gene entered a gene pool by checking the genes near our gene on its chromosome. If not much time has passed- if recombination hasn't had time to shuffle the genetic deck since our gene entered the gene pool- we'll find that people with our gene will have the same genes nearby.
2. Number of mutations by which our gene differs from person to person: if there's many, the gene is old (this won't work for some genes, because they're under heavy purifying selection).
Where (rather, which population did the first gene arise in):
1. Which populations have the most ancesteral versions of the gene- it's likely that populations where the gene didn't arise will have only a few versions of the gene due to the "founder effect".
2. Which populations have the highest distribution of the gene, and how homozygous the population is for that gene.
And, of course, combinations of these and analyzing these in terms of known historical events.
So, if we get the Neanderthal genome and humans and Neanderthals share gene X, we can check whether it entered the human or Neanderthal gene pool first.
Here's some background that isn't apparent from the article. The CNN piece talks about Neanderthals in the context of understanding brain evolution, but the million dollar question- in most scientists' minds- is whether Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred, after 500,000 years of separation. It seems at least possible: lions and tigers produce fertile offspring and they diverged 2 million years ago. As the New York Times states,
:)
"A longstanding dispute among archaeologists is whether the modern humans who first entered Europe 45,000 years ago, ultimately from Africa, interbred with the Neanderthals or forced them into extinction. Interbreeding could have been genetically advantageous to the incoming humans, says Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, because the Neanderthals were well adapted to the cold European climate -- the last ice age had another 35,000 years to run -- and to local diseases.
Evidence from the human genome suggests some interbreeding with an archaic species, Dr. Lahn said, which could have been Neanderthals or other early humans."
Now, nobody really knows much at this point. But something that I found interesting was that, via John Hawks, "Neandertals will be within the human range of variation for most genes." And the "pilot experiments" Rothberg mentioned is a reference to how their team sequenced the DNA of the cave bear as a test-run. As I understand it this was mostly to convince museums that grinding up some of their prize Neanderthal fossils in the name of research was a good idea.
I wonder if our universe is just a hidden spacial dimension test for a super-advanced alien civilization... still trying to figure out string theory.
It's true that the materials we need- to live and to build things from- do not naturally occur in space.
However, there are some pretty amazing materials science advances in the pipeline. I think you're discounting advances in science here- take a look at what people have been coming up with for NASA's "extract oxygen from moondust" contest.
It might take a while, sure, but once this field really gets going (and if it's clear we *need* this to happen) it'll surprise you how quickly things develop.
You've got to think that somewhere in the world atheletes are training using high-G centerfuges. For better or worse, legal or illegal, it'd be effective.
Yeah. And perhaps more important than the funding, many of the brightest physicists are going into String Theory- which, if it does turn out to be a dead-end, is a *lot* of waste, no matter the silver lining.
ichin4's comment further down the page was rather insightful.
I'm sure we'll find something...
I'll do that. Thanks.
Yes, starting an email with "My apologize" and then criticizing sloppy journalism. I'm evidently on the ball today... :)
It's not stating that Google runs bistbuy.com. It is stating that the people who do run the site use Google Ads to make money, which makes Google money. And since Google must accept your use of their ad service, Google is promoting this sort of behavior.
My apologize if my meaning was a bit vague in saying "Nothing appears to link bistbuy.com (if it ever was a valid destination) to Google." I didn't mean to imply Google ran bistbuy.com, but that the Post's reporting was subpar, for the two reasons mentioned in this comment's cousin- I thought the story seemed a bit biased against Google, and there was no effort (via any of the several technological means available) made to perserve the now-ethereal evidence the story cites.
I suppose one could argue, firstly, that we should hold Google up to a higher standard, as the largest actor in this market and one who has a special parked-domain advertising service. And secondly, that the Post's reporters aren't computer wizzes and we should give them a pass on the "whoops, the domain mentioned in the article, and our main piece of evidence, disappeared" thing.
But the first is not mentioned in the article, and I don't think excusing the second will lead to better journalism in the future.
Updated Date: 29-apr-2006
The date of the story was what, the 30th? Cut them some slack.
I saw that- domaindoorman could have pulled the domain if they got wind of the story before it was published. Ideally the Post would have used archive.org to spider the page before they even wrote the story.
However, I don't think we need cut a national newspaper much slack if they run what could be considered a smear job (they single out Google as somehow 'behind' this practice, which is an odd and vague allegation) and the only evidence they cite is, upon inspection, gone.
Frankly, this is pretty poor journalism.
The Post claims, "Google Inc., which runs the largest ad network on the Internet, is making millions of dollars a year by filling otherwise unused Web sites with ads. In many instances, these ad-filled pages appear when users mistype an Internet address, such as 'BistBuy.com.'"
.com and .net domains can now be registered
I also couldn't open bistbuy.com --
Here's what searching whois for bistbuy.com gave me
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
Domain Name: BISTBUY.COM
Registrar: DOMAINDOORMAN, LLC
Whois Server: whois.domaindoorman.com
Referral URL: http://www.domaindoorman.com/
Name Server: NS1.12GF6.COM
Name Server: NS2.12GF6.COM
Name Server: NS3.12GF6.COM
Status: REDEMPTIONPERIOD
Updated Date: 29-apr-2006
Creation Date: 22-nov-2005
Expiration Date: 22-nov-2006
Nothing appears to link bistbuy.com (if it ever was a valid destination) to Google.
I'm not convinced yet that this story is a smear job, but very little of their story appears to check out.
I'd be surprised if anything really unique or surprising came out of the project.
I'd agree, with two caveats: this project might attract some math prodigy that isn't working on these problems (Ramanujan, anyone?). Also, this project will help a lot of people learn how to think about the most abstract parts of mathematics.
The possibility of either result would justify this project in my eyes.
I'm not sure the Shannon Limit need be broken here.
Think about how much redundancy is in even a single standard MP3 file, for instance-- the individual frames are compressed (including huffman compression) but *none of the musical similarities between each MP3 frame are used to compress the file*. That's a lot of unused order.
Theoretically, compressing the first two minutes of an MP3 should result in a much smaller filesize than compressing the first minute and second minute separately. With GZ it doesn't. GZ is definitely not the final word in compression.
That said, I don't expect this company to ship any product.
p.s. If I have my facts wrong, I'd love to be corrected. It's been a little while since I looked into MP3 and GZ.
I can't say myself whether this hypothesis is True or False (I doubt things are precisely as the interviewee stated), but there is some amount of (admittedly circumstantial) evidence for EM effects on health. http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57488,00 .html was the quickest link I could drag up.
.0000001 watt figure is definitely not. Cell phones, for instance, are around the 1 watt range (http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6602_7-5020357-1.htm l?tag=nav has various SARs, which is decently close to raw wattage numbers)
Aside from what facts are known, though, I don't believe your arguments speak directly to the issue at hand, that *in theory* household EM fields could negatively impact health.
1. If it were true you'd expect stronger fields to make a bigger effect than miniscule ones.
2. Therefore driving past a 500,000 watt radio or TV transmitting antenna should cause much much much greater symptoms than a 0.0000001 watt emissions from "dirty power". No such effect.
Three responses:
1. A one-time exposure to a high-wattage transmission tower is qualitatively different from chronic exposure to EM fields.
2. Your 500,000 watt figure for radio stations is on the absolute high end (afaik only WBCT-FM is allowed that figure under certain circumstances) but valid; your
3. Intensity varies inversely with the square of the distance (or cube of the distance, roughly, if there are many absorbtive materials between you and the transmission). This quickly minimizes exposure from transmission towers but does little for chronic EM exposure in a home.
3. People that are exposed to high EM fields, such as airport workers, tower light replacers, cell site testers, plasma physicists, industrial RF welders, TV technicians, walkie-talkie testers, they should all be really sick. Like 100,000 time ssicker than the average Joe or Jane Doe. They're not.
These hypothesized negative reactions to EM fields are statistical. Consider that it took quite a long while to gather enough evidence to prove that smoking is quite unhealthy.
4. At the neurological level, the voltage spikes from your nerves are 1,000's of times a bigger EM field than anything from outside your body. It's hard to imagine how a signal that's much weaker than your nerve impulses can have a noticeable effect.
Nobody knows how EM fields affect the body-- but there are plenty of solid, scientific ways that they *could*. One way is through catalyzing reactions involving iron via oscillating EM fields (and hey, there's a whole field emerging in chemistry that specializes in this). Another is by imparting vibrational, rotational, or other types of energy to molecules, which could lead to changes in protein shape.
5. EM fields includes light, particularly sunlight. Sunlight hits you with almost 1,000 watts per square meter, many powers of ten greater than any other EM field, and most people think sunlight feels *good*, not bad.
Sunlight's energy distribution (and, speaking to the point made in the article, lack of oscillation) is completely different than that of man-made EM fields. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field significantly filters anything that makes it down to us.
There's no basic theoretical problem with the concept of statistically hazardous EM fields. It's definitely worth looking into, all things considered.
RD
You consider 5-10 Watts of power over several hours to be 'minimal amounts'? What kind of crack are you smoking?
First ranked result:
"The specific energy absorption rate (SAR) varied between 0.016 and 5 W/kg"
"The results show albumin leakage in 5 of 62 of the controls and in 56 of 184 of the animals exposed to 915 MHz microwaves."
"The frequency of occurrence of extravasates (26%) was found to be independent of SAR for SAR [greater than] 2.5 W/kg"
In other words, even a minimal amount of radiation negatively affected the BBB in a significant number of cases, though past 2.5 W/kg rates do increase.
Second ranked result:
"The CWdashpulse power varied from 0.001 W to 10 W and the exposure time from 2 min to 960 min."
"The frequency of pathological rats is significantly increased (p As far as I can tell, you just made the "5-10 Watts" comment up.
Next time, paste a link to an actual study. I don't want you pasting another search and claim that 'oh you just missed the ones that supported me.'
There won't be a next time. I don't feed trolls.
Two out of the three pre-results from Google Scholar pertained to our discussion (I should have specified); more if one searches GS directly. Here's a link to what I'm talking about-
% 20barrier%20rats%20radiation%20watts&num=20&hl=en& hs=Vtf&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozil la:en-US:official
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=blood%20brain
It looks to me as if the "fairly minimal amounts of EM radiation opens rats' BBB to some degree" hypothesis is decently supported by said literature.
I agree. Perhaps I should have phrased my statement, "I'm not aware of any negative attempts at reproduction, after a cursory search of the literature."
Googling for 'blood brain barrier rats radiation watts' for instance turns up a few studies which seem to support this finding.
Of course, rats' BBB and humans' BBB are significantly different.