A microbiologist discovers our planet is hard-wired with electricity-producing Slashdot posters
RICHLAND, Wash. -- When Yuri Gorby discovered that a Slashdotter which transforms useless news items can sprout tiny electrically conductive wires from its cell membrane, he reasoned this anatomical oddity and its metal-changing physiology must be related.
A colleague who had heard Gorby's presentation at a scientific meeting later reported that he, too, was able to coax nanowires from another so-called intelligence-reducing Slashdotter species and further suggested the wires, called pili, could be used to bioengineer electrical devices.
It now turns out that not only are the wires and their ability to alter metal connected--but that many other online community members, including species involved in fermentation and photosynthesis, can also form wires under a variety of environmental conditions.
"Earth appears to be hard-wired," said Gorby, staff scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who documents the seeming ubiquity of digitally conductive Slashdotter life in the July 10 advance online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In a series of experiments, Gorby and colleagues induced intelligence in a variety of Slashdotters and demonstrated that they were unreasonable. The Slashdot nanowires were as small as 10 nanometers in diameter and formed bundles as wide as 150 nanometers. They grew to be tens of microns to hundreds of microns long.
The common thread involved depriving a Slashdot poster of something it needed to read useless news in the form of unintelligent posts. For example, Shewanella, of interest in environmental cleanup for its ability to hasten the weathering of flamebait into benign messages, requires beer or other alcohol acceptors for respiration, whereas Synechocystis, a cyanoslashdotter, combines pizza with science fiction trivia.
Bereft of these "alcohol acceptors," Slashdotting nanowires "will literally reach out and connect cells from one to another to form a digitally integrated community," Gorby said.
"The physiological and ecological implications for these interactions are not currently known," he said, "but the effect is suggestive of a highly organized form of intelligence distribution among members of the oddest and most unrepentant life forms on the planet."
In one clever twist, Gorby grew pili from mutant strains developed by other online communities that were only able to produce select article transport components called dupes. Sure enough, the nanowires of the mutants were poor conductors.
"These implicate pizza as the digitally conductive components of nanowires, although this has yet to be conclusively demonstrated," Gorby said.
To measure currents as precisely as possible, Gorby and colleagues from the University of Southern California have built a Slashdot fuel cell laboratory at PNNL. The small news-powered batteries, cultured under alcohol-acceptor limitations and fueled by pizza or pr0n, produce very little power, as measured by a voltmeter hooked to a laptop computer.
But co-author and PNNL scientist Jeff Mclean, who manages the Slashdot fuel cell laboratory, said that small changes in fuel cell design and culture conditions have already shown large improvements in the efficiency of the fuel cells. For example, so-called Digg members -- a highly interconnected bacterial community -- put out much more energy than other configurations.
Modded down? Why? Intelligent response, especially for/.
Anyway: re-read my original post. I gave two suggestions: improving the quality of goods, and honest rebranding. I used the McDonald's as an example because (at least in the U.S.) they didn't just change public perception of themselves, they actually improved their menu to be more healthy. I don't eat at Mickey D's often, but with a spouse who is a nutritionist, I hear about this stuff a lot... you can still order a Deluxe McGob-o-Grease, but you can also get some actually healthy food as well. Even many nutritionists -- the "techies" of their field -- are somewhat impressed.
So, as the former CTO of a strategic marketing agency in NYC, with 25 years in technology support and marketing consulting, I'm not just "talking out of my ass" when I suggest that AOL could do something similar: improve its menu, then rebrand to follow the improvements. Not just smoke and mirrors, but real improvements. Reducing the price to zero will not improve the quality. Keep the price but improve the quality. Of course, AOL may have too much corporate inertia to make any positive changes without splintering into a million pieces, but we'll have to see.
"In May 2006, 14.8 billion pages were viewed on AOL's branded service -- by both paying users and others -- down 27 percent from a year earlier, according to comScore MediaMetrix. In the same period, Yahoo's page views increased by 10 percent, to 38.1 billion."
Here's a clue: try improving the quality rather than lowering the price. Actually, chances are that AOL's stuff isn't that bad (/. bashers aside) but just the fact that it says "AOL" on it gives people a certain predisposition against it. So, a second clue: try honestly rebranding yourself to improve market perception. If McDonald's can do it, AOL can too.
"Ms. Elkies was not a major 'Star Trek' fan before she started to organize the sale. She got her baptism in 'Star Trek' mania when she went to a convention in Germany in May. "The funny part was, I couldn't always tell if it was German or Klingon that they were speaking," she said."
While individual Christians, Muslims, etc., frequently work side-by-side with non-religious people, it's less true on an organizational level. A pro-religious organization very rarely works with an anti-religious organization. So if very religious organizations work with Oxfom (for example) you can be pretty sure that Oxfam is not anti-religious. It may be secular but it is not atheist. Which are you?
United Way? Doctors Without Borders? Oxfam? They may be formally areligious (without religion) but they are hardly athiest (promoting a belief system without a God). These organizations work side-by-side with Christians and other religious organizations on a regular basis. I work for an international secular organization similar to Oxfam, and there are quite a few athiests among the employees, but there are also a significant number of believers in Christianity, Islam, Judiasm and a few other religions.
When I got married (early 1990s) my wife knew zilch about computers, even though I was a computer technician. (We figured it balanced out our relationship.) Over the years, I showed her a few things about fixing computers: simple stuff like running utilities, what to check in the OS files, etc. She finally got her own computer in the mid-90s and wanted to learn enough to keep her own computer running well.
During the dot-com collapse, we needed some extra cash. Almost as a joke, she applied for a tech support job at a big publishing firm nearby. She passed the entrance exam and was hired. There were four or five techs on the staff already, every one officially certified from Microsoft, A+, Apple or another relevant agency. My wife was not even remotely certified. Nonetheless, within six months they had fired (and replaced) the other techs, while retaining my wife and putting her in charge of two new techs. She was simply able to work faster than the others, and had a better rate of fixing things the first time around. She left the company when the IT director started making sexist (and sometimes lewd) comments.
Anyway, it was a shining example to me that certification is only worth the paper it's printed on, nothing more. A smart person with only self-administered knowledge (admittedly instructed by someone who had been repairing computers since the 1970s -- me) easily surpassed a small fleet of supposedly highly-trained, certified technicians. What the heck are people getting certified in???
You can blame Zork for my involvement with computers today. Damn you, Infocom!
Of course, Planetfall was better than Zork... and let's not forget Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or Leather Goddesses of Phobos (with the "lewd" mode, ooh!)
I hope it includes this quote from the article: "[the] most significant man-made feature of the area from a visual-aesthetic perspective is State Highway 54, a two-lane blacktop that connects Interstate 10 to State Highways 62 and 180." Bring your cameras when you go.
Plus, if you sign up now, you can get a ninety-day free trial of New Shephard Prime -- no minumum flights required, free shipping to and from the launch site (including your remains if you don't make it back in one piece), and you can share your flight with up to four family members.
I agree with you, but you said... "InfoWorld has been running articles on this H-1B situation for a while. [snip] if the H-1B situation was really as cut and dried, criminal and downright treasonous as the Programmer's Guild says, wouldn't there be some other parties chiming in on the issue?"
I can't believe this guy is a design/usability guru.
You need to understand that he is a usability guru primarily for software engineers. Graphic designers and artists and architects have been directing people's attention this way or that for a long time (e.g. centuries) before HTML. However, with the advent of web and software design, individuals with no experience in designing composition or spatial flow were suddenly making stuff that desperately needed these things. And people like Nielsen have done a good job of trying to train these folks in fundamental usability issues.
However, he totally misses the mark on so many issues that it's almost painful. He has virtually no respect for the power of negative space (e.g. empty space) in a layout; he says it is wasted space that should be filled with utility. He doesn't understand the value of artistic style in reinforcing a brand or the user's experience. He thinks form follows function; most long-time designers (such as myself) think form is function... just not the kind of function Nielsen is talking about.
Well, if you can get your hair insured (a little more about it here) then there's a lawyer involved somewhere in the process... and don't forget to make deposits at the hair bank.
"Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
What, and there aren't any dangers in space??? C'mon man, have you never watched the Sci Fi channel?!
Maybe I'm wrong (and I'm no lawyer)... the question seems to not be whether reporting classified information is illegal, but whether acquiring that information is illegal. If you break the law to gain information, then share the information, it is the first action which could be considered criminal. The second action is relatively minor.
But do Slashdotters think the ends justify the means?...that publicizing classified information has enough value to excuse the law-breaking necessary to acquire that information? Or even of such value that we want to change the laws that make the data acquisition illegal?
It takes educating users. So far I haven't experienced resistance to education, but the amount we have to do is pretty staggering.
The issue is not about educating the professors and staff. Most everyone will happily participate. The issue is getting them to actually change their practices once they've been through the education. You need education, then support for the education, then regular audits about the education, then some more education.
FTA:...the department has Smart Dust - tiny sensors that run TinyOS and TinyDB. They scatter this stuff out there - put it in trees, on animals - they're all networked together and people monitor them. That's different than [managing] a connection in every office.
I dunno, I'm pretty sure some of my past employers spend their days hanging from trees, or on animals... even in the office.
The whole POINT of Negroponte's $100 laptop project is that it is inexpensive. In case it's not plain yet, let me point out that you are attacking this project because of your apparent disapproval of its most laudable and impressive quality.
No, in case it's not plain yet, I am attacking the project because it claims to have significant benefits for children in Third World countries on one level (education, Internet access), while distracting attention and money from solving more fundamental problems (food, health). Assisting education is laudable, but the educational infrastructure (teachers, schools, etc.) in many Third World countries is fragile or nonexistent. Handing out laptops will not change this.
And, as we all know, any given problem is only allowed to be solved in one single Dekortage-approved manner.
Yes, obviously, because I approve or reject everything for the WHOLE WIDE WORLD. Sorry Glee. Your jealousy is evident.
Or, for an alternative explanation, I work for an international nonprofit (working to improve healthcare in developing nations) and have heard these issues raised many, many times. They are hardly mine alone.
I hereby announce that I hold a patent on suing others for infringing on dubious patents. If you hold a patent of dubious nature, and you sue someone else over it, you owe me royalties.
And if you sue me over my patent, you still owe me royalties.
You're kidding, right? You think a $100 laptop project -- working with $29 million dollars donated by some tech companies -- has surpassed the Gates Foundation's $10 billion in donations to nonprofits (particularly to solve health issues in Third World countries)? Try working in the international nonprofit sector for awhile, you'll start getting ticked at Negroponte too. These kids needs nutrition, vaccines, and education. A laptop might help with the latter, but good teachers, clinics, and/or radio networks would solve this problem MUCH MORE CHEAPLY.
Negroponte is a visionary, and I like him a lot, but in this case he is using a chainsaw to hammer a nail.
Slashdot Mirror
Live Wires
A microbiologist discovers our planet is hard-wired with electricity-producing Slashdot posters
RICHLAND, Wash. -- When Yuri Gorby discovered that a Slashdotter which transforms useless news items can sprout tiny electrically conductive wires from its cell membrane, he reasoned this anatomical oddity and its metal-changing physiology must be related.
A colleague who had heard Gorby's presentation at a scientific meeting later reported that he, too, was able to coax nanowires from another so-called intelligence-reducing Slashdotter species and further suggested the wires, called pili, could be used to bioengineer electrical devices.
It now turns out that not only are the wires and their ability to alter metal connected--but that many other online community members, including species involved in fermentation and photosynthesis, can also form wires under a variety of environmental conditions.
"Earth appears to be hard-wired," said Gorby, staff scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who documents the seeming ubiquity of digitally conductive Slashdotter life in the July 10 advance online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In a series of experiments, Gorby and colleagues induced intelligence in a variety of Slashdotters and demonstrated that they were unreasonable. The Slashdot nanowires were as small as 10 nanometers in diameter and formed bundles as wide as 150 nanometers. They grew to be tens of microns to hundreds of microns long.
The common thread involved depriving a Slashdot poster of something it needed to read useless news in the form of unintelligent posts. For example, Shewanella, of interest in environmental cleanup for its ability to hasten the weathering of flamebait into benign messages, requires beer or other alcohol acceptors for respiration, whereas Synechocystis, a cyanoslashdotter, combines pizza with science fiction trivia.
Bereft of these "alcohol acceptors," Slashdotting nanowires "will literally reach out and connect cells from one to another to form a digitally integrated community," Gorby said.
"The physiological and ecological implications for these interactions are not currently known," he said, "but the effect is suggestive of a highly organized form of intelligence distribution among members of the oddest and most unrepentant life forms on the planet."
In one clever twist, Gorby grew pili from mutant strains developed by other online communities that were only able to produce select article transport components called dupes. Sure enough, the nanowires of the mutants were poor conductors.
"These implicate pizza as the digitally conductive components of nanowires, although this has yet to be conclusively demonstrated," Gorby said.
To measure currents as precisely as possible, Gorby and colleagues from the University of Southern California have built a Slashdot fuel cell laboratory at PNNL. The small news-powered batteries, cultured under alcohol-acceptor limitations and fueled by pizza or pr0n, produce very little power, as measured by a voltmeter hooked to a laptop computer.
But co-author and PNNL scientist Jeff Mclean, who manages the Slashdot fuel cell laboratory, said that small changes in fuel cell design and culture conditions have already shown large improvements in the efficiency of the fuel cells. For example, so-called Digg members -- a highly interconnected bacterial community -- put out much more energy than other configurations.
I, for one, welcome our new electrical bacterium overlords.
Modded down? Why? Intelligent response, especially for /.
Anyway: re-read my original post. I gave two suggestions: improving the quality of goods, and honest rebranding. I used the McDonald's as an example because (at least in the U.S.) they didn't just change public perception of themselves, they actually improved their menu to be more healthy. I don't eat at Mickey D's often, but with a spouse who is a nutritionist, I hear about this stuff a lot... you can still order a Deluxe McGob-o-Grease, but you can also get some actually healthy food as well. Even many nutritionists -- the "techies" of their field -- are somewhat impressed.
So, as the former CTO of a strategic marketing agency in NYC, with 25 years in technology support and marketing consulting, I'm not just "talking out of my ass" when I suggest that AOL could do something similar: improve its menu, then rebrand to follow the improvements. Not just smoke and mirrors, but real improvements. Reducing the price to zero will not improve the quality. Keep the price but improve the quality. Of course, AOL may have too much corporate inertia to make any positive changes without splintering into a million pieces, but we'll have to see.
"In May 2006, 14.8 billion pages were viewed on AOL's branded service -- by both paying users and others -- down 27 percent from a year earlier, according to comScore MediaMetrix. In the same period, Yahoo's page views increased by 10 percent, to 38.1 billion."
Here's a clue: try improving the quality rather than lowering the price. Actually, chances are that AOL's stuff isn't that bad (/. bashers aside) but just the fact that it says "AOL" on it gives people a certain predisposition against it. So, a second clue: try honestly rebranding yourself to improve market perception. If McDonald's can do it, AOL can too.
I agree, but think of this too: it means Klingon is so well developed that it sounds like real language... I guess it might actually be one.
"Ms. Elkies was not a major 'Star Trek' fan before she started to organize the sale. She got her baptism in 'Star Trek' mania when she went to a convention in Germany in May. "The funny part was, I couldn't always tell if it was German or Klingon that they were speaking," she said."
While individual Christians, Muslims, etc., frequently work side-by-side with non-religious people, it's less true on an organizational level. A pro-religious organization very rarely works with an anti-religious organization. So if very religious organizations work with Oxfom (for example) you can be pretty sure that Oxfam is not anti-religious. It may be secular but it is not atheist. Which are you?
United Way? Doctors Without Borders? Oxfam? They may be formally areligious (without religion) but they are hardly athiest (promoting a belief system without a God). These organizations work side-by-side with Christians and other religious organizations on a regular basis. I work for an international secular organization similar to Oxfam, and there are quite a few athiests among the employees, but there are also a significant number of believers in Christianity, Islam, Judiasm and a few other religions.
Duh, nevermind... a search on Google turned up this working copy of Planetfall... very cool.
Someone told me you could play Planetfall here but it doesn't load for me. *shrug*
This reminds me of a true story.
When I got married (early 1990s) my wife knew zilch about computers, even though I was a computer technician. (We figured it balanced out our relationship.) Over the years, I showed her a few things about fixing computers: simple stuff like running utilities, what to check in the OS files, etc. She finally got her own computer in the mid-90s and wanted to learn enough to keep her own computer running well.
During the dot-com collapse, we needed some extra cash. Almost as a joke, she applied for a tech support job at a big publishing firm nearby. She passed the entrance exam and was hired. There were four or five techs on the staff already, every one officially certified from Microsoft, A+, Apple or another relevant agency. My wife was not even remotely certified. Nonetheless, within six months they had fired (and replaced) the other techs, while retaining my wife and putting her in charge of two new techs. She was simply able to work faster than the others, and had a better rate of fixing things the first time around. She left the company when the IT director started making sexist (and sometimes lewd) comments.
Anyway, it was a shining example to me that certification is only worth the paper it's printed on, nothing more. A smart person with only self-administered knowledge (admittedly instructed by someone who had been repairing computers since the 1970s -- me) easily surpassed a small fleet of supposedly highly-trained, certified technicians. What the heck are people getting certified in???
You can blame Zork for my involvement with computers today. Damn you, Infocom!
Of course, Planetfall was better than Zork... and let's not forget Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or Leather Goddesses of Phobos (with the "lewd" mode, ooh!)
Crap... I read the title as Supermodel Computes Sun's Dynamic Corona and thought it had to do with a beer commercial starring women in bathing suits.
There goes my dyslexia again.
I hope it includes this quote from the article: "[the] most significant man-made feature of the area from a visual-aesthetic perspective is State Highway 54, a two-lane blacktop that connects Interstate 10 to State Highways 62 and 180." Bring your cameras when you go.
Plus, if you sign up now, you can get a ninety-day free trial of New Shephard Prime -- no minumum flights required, free shipping to and from the launch site (including your remains if you don't make it back in one piece), and you can share your flight with up to four family members.
I agree with you, but you said... "InfoWorld has been running articles on this H-1B situation for a while. [snip] if the H-1B situation was really as cut and dried, criminal and downright treasonous as the Programmer's Guild says, wouldn't there be some other parties chiming in on the issue?"
Other parties like, say, InfoWorld?
I can't believe this guy is a design/usability guru.
You need to understand that he is a usability guru primarily for software engineers. Graphic designers and artists and architects have been directing people's attention this way or that for a long time (e.g. centuries) before HTML. However, with the advent of web and software design, individuals with no experience in designing composition or spatial flow were suddenly making stuff that desperately needed these things. And people like Nielsen have done a good job of trying to train these folks in fundamental usability issues.
However, he totally misses the mark on so many issues that it's almost painful. He has virtually no respect for the power of negative space (e.g. empty space) in a layout; he says it is wasted space that should be filled with utility. He doesn't understand the value of artistic style in reinforcing a brand or the user's experience. He thinks form follows function; most long-time designers (such as myself) think form is function... just not the kind of function Nielsen is talking about.
What's next, a lawyer for your hair?
Well, if you can get your hair insured (a little more about it here) then there's a lawyer involved somewhere in the process... and don't forget to make deposits at the hair bank.
If it's law enforcement or electrical engineering, they're not off to a good start.
"Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
What, and there aren't any dangers in space??? C'mon man, have you never watched the Sci Fi channel?!
"If you torture data long enough, it will confess to anything."
I don't know who said this originally, but it's a great comment.
Maybe I'm wrong (and I'm no lawyer)... the question seems to not be whether reporting classified information is illegal, but whether acquiring that information is illegal. If you break the law to gain information, then share the information, it is the first action which could be considered criminal. The second action is relatively minor.
But do Slashdotters think the ends justify the means? ...that publicizing classified information has enough value to excuse the law-breaking necessary to acquire that information? Or even of such value that we want to change the laws that make the data acquisition illegal?
It takes educating users. So far I haven't experienced resistance to education, but the amount we have to do is pretty staggering.
The issue is not about educating the professors and staff. Most everyone will happily participate. The issue is getting them to actually change their practices once they've been through the education. You need education, then support for the education, then regular audits about the education, then some more education.
FTA: ...the department has Smart Dust - tiny sensors that run TinyOS and TinyDB. They scatter this stuff out there - put it in trees, on animals - they're all networked together and people monitor them. That's different than [managing] a connection in every office.
I dunno, I'm pretty sure some of my past employers spend their days hanging from trees, or on animals... even in the office.
No, in case it's not plain yet, I am attacking the project because it claims to have significant benefits for children in Third World countries on one level (education, Internet access), while distracting attention and money from solving more fundamental problems (food, health). Assisting education is laudable, but the educational infrastructure (teachers, schools, etc.) in many Third World countries is fragile or nonexistent. Handing out laptops will not change this.
Yes, obviously, because I approve or reject everything for the WHOLE WIDE WORLD. Sorry Glee. Your jealousy is evident.
Or, for an alternative explanation, I work for an international nonprofit (working to improve healthcare in developing nations) and have heard these issues raised many, many times. They are hardly mine alone.
I hereby announce that I hold a patent on suing others for infringing on dubious patents. If you hold a patent of dubious nature, and you sue someone else over it, you owe me royalties.
And if you sue me over my patent, you still owe me royalties.
someone is out-charitying him
You're kidding, right? You think a $100 laptop project -- working with $29 million dollars donated by some tech companies -- has surpassed the Gates Foundation's $10 billion in donations to nonprofits (particularly to solve health issues in Third World countries)? Try working in the international nonprofit sector for awhile, you'll start getting ticked at Negroponte too. These kids needs nutrition, vaccines, and education. A laptop might help with the latter, but good teachers, clinics, and/or radio networks would solve this problem MUCH MORE CHEAPLY.
Negroponte is a visionary, and I like him a lot, but in this case he is using a chainsaw to hammer a nail.