You're right in many cases. Freshman chemistry course material doesn't change. Freshman math doesn't change. This is much less true for senior-level undergraduate and graduate courses.
However, the student isn't entirely helpless. My undergraduate profs didn't assign page numbers. They'd tell me to read the section on Gas Chromatography. They'd give me print-outs with problems and solutions. Students are also free to guide themselves in their readings. If you're worried about "new" material that you might miss in reading an older edition of the textbook -- in stark opposition to your point -- then ask the professor about it.
If the course is modeled such that you are *required* to buy a textbook, complain! Get the prof to photocopy and pass out these materials. They get budgets to do this.
I agree that this is all problematic. I'm arguing that torrents aren't the solution.
"With the average cost of textbooks going up every year, and with some books costing more than $100, some experts say that piracy will only increase."
It's not my intention to troll, but this certainly won't help the cost aspect of it. College textbooks are different from music CDs in their profit margin. They differ at least in the cost of production and the frequency of purchase. There has to be some justifiable reason for professors to write these books -- they need compensation for their time.
I'm not saying that publishers are not abusive in this respect. I'd much rather see government-sponsored textbooks (textbook grants) or independent publishing.
There needs to be a solution to this problem, and I'm quite sure that this will not have the desired long-term effect.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 1
sorry to reply to my own post. I accidentally didn't format the linux MD RAID 10 driver page correctly:
Also, it may not have been evident from my post, but this is all through software RAID. It is also my understanding that this RAID 10 mode is less CPU intensive than RAID 5, but this isn't much of an issue with today's fast, multi-core processors.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Just to add a bit of information to this post. I believe the RAID mode this poster is talking about is indeed RAID 10 and not RAID 1+0 or 0+1 -- stripped mirrors or mirrored stripes. This new RAID mode is supported by the linux md driver.
This RAID mode does not require an even number of discs. My understanding is that writes are much faster with RAID 10 than RAID 5 because parity checks are not necessary. However, this RAID10 mode gives you only half of your total RAID size, and RAID 5 gives you your total RAID size minus one drive in capacity.
Some useful, more detailed (and likely more accurate) information
Some performance comparison results to RAID 5.
It would appear that the read performance is close to RAID 0, and the write performance is close to RAID 0 divided by two -- because every write has to be done twice. Furthermore, RAID10 can be more robust for drive failure.
[Your] best bet now is to get a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that have an unusually good range, and some of the Logitechs seem to qualify, but it's a gamble.
The suit notes, "If AT&T or Starbucks wanted to offer 'free' Wi-Fi in non-transitioned stores for Starbucks customers, as they are now doing, they should have - and, indeed, were contractually required to - negotiate such an arrangement with T-Mobile."
the peroxide fizzes for several minutes and during that time the surgeon has to keep his fingers away from the brain, and it's THAT that arrests the bleeding. seems easy enough to test. Replace the peroxide with Folgers crystals and see if he notices.
I spend considerably more than 5 bucks on music a month. If I'm paying to download music off the net, I suspect that I may be less motivated to pay more than 5 bucks a month for music.
I've always felt this way about hemeopathy and alternative medecine. I was married to a woman that believed and used hemeopathic mixtures and alternative medical techniques like colonics. In my mind, endorsing these products and ideas is as silly as believing that the earth is flat. In any case, we discussed how homeopathy works -- serial dilution to increase the potency of natural products that induce various ailments -- as well as the dangers of alternative medicine, and she stopped using these methods. I think it becomes problematic when your partner deliberately continues to subscribe to a way of thinking that he/she knows is blatantly contradictory to modern science.
Well because there's a point when it becomes too expensive. Where is that threshold. 10 billion, 100 billion, 1 trillion, 10 trillion? As an academic, I'm certainly in favour of research pursuits that satisfy intellectual rather than practical questions. Learning for the sake of learning is fun and important. Academics have to be realistic too. In funding decisions -- where money is limited -- intellectual projects are necessarily secondary to practical ones.
I don't disagree that going to Mars would be cool. There would undoubtedly be new technological advances that would be useful in other fields -- although arguably, we could tackle those problems and develop the technologies directly. However, at what point does it cost too much?
It's not clear to me what benefits we'd get in trying to get humans to Mars.
Presumably, the technologies developed could be used in many other areas, but why not develop technologies for those problems/needs directly? What can't we learn from automated robots? Would that money be better spent elsewhere? (Admittedly, I work in health research, and I'm biased.).
Going to Mars would be very cool, but I'd imagine that it would require considerable resources. Is it really worth it?
I'm always suspicious whenever I see ostensibly "high-impact" summaries that link to press releases of work that is either unpublished or published in low impact journals. In this case, I haven't looked up the impact factor of the journal PLoS pathogens (article), but I do biophysics research on HIV and I've never heard of this journal. As a useful general rule, science articles shouldn't appear on here (and waste everyone's time) unless they've been submitted through a peer-reviewed journal (not the case here), and I think they should hit high-impact journals like Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS,...
The study found that "death of the player's own character...appear[s] to increase some aspects of positive emotion
I have a much more simple explanation. Players like it because it means that they're not being ignored. Having "friends" that pay attention to you is a huge plus for geeks.
You're right. The intention here is not to create new proteins, but to tag DNA and possibly create new DNA nanostructures. At the end of the day, mRNAs that are translated to proteins still will only have access to the same set of tRNAs, and therefore, the same 20 amino-acids.
The article can be found here. [PDF download requires a subscription]
A more interesting discovery (in my opinion) -- from the Scripps Institute -- was made about ~10-15 years ago (IIRC) by Pete Schultz's group. They modified tRNAs so that specific codons (DNA/RNA triplets) could incorporate chemically-modified amino-acids into a protein. Some of this has led to interesting work on protein tagging, functional studies as well as the study of molecular evolution. All this is done with in vitro translation, as far as I know.
You misunderstood the conclusion they're trying to push from the result. (This isn't surprising because the summary didn't get the article.)
As you've stated, DNA molecules that open up and close will more likely hybridize with molecules with a similar sequence. It's basic thermodynamics. The more complementary hydrogen bonds you can make between the bases of two DNA molecules, the more stable that molecule will be, and therefore, there will be a much greater population of that combination of DNA molecules in solution. Site directed mutagenesis works on this principle.
What they're proposing in this article is that you have DNA molecules that recognize each others sequences without opening up. Two double stranded DNA molecules (dsDNA) *recognize* each other without seeing each other's bases -- purely an electrostatic effect and not a hydrogen-bonding effect. In B-form DNA, the bases are hidden by the DNA backbone, and their conclusion strikes many people (including myself) as crazy. I have another post that elaborates on this.
I was quite suspicious of their claim, so I read the original article.
The claim is that long DNA molecules (200bp) that have double helix structure (dsDNA) can "detect" each other over long distances -- as long as nanometers. Their claim is that sequence specific electrostatic type interactions -- which scale as 1/r -- lead to such recognition. Since the base interactions themselves are through H-bonds, the claim is that the base-pairs have subtle effects on the phosphodiester backbone (and the counter-ions around them) such that identical dsDNA molecules can recognize each other electrostatically without opening up. As stated in their introduction, this is quite controversial.
DNA molecules already "recognize" themselves by opening up and hybridizing, and the lower energy molecular pairs -- i.e. sequence matched strands -- are more populated than mismatched molecules. They try to address this : "We consider it to be rather unlikely in this instance, since the probability of bubble formation in unstressed linear DNA of the studied length is very small in contrast to the case where topological strain is relieved by bubble formation in small circular DNA molecules."
I'm not so sure that I would rule this option out because even partial hybridization changes the diffusivity constants of ssDNA/dsDNA molecules, which could lead to "pockets" of higher local concentration. I'm surprised that this wasn't elaborated more carefully, and that reviewers didn't jump all over this. Furthermore, I think they should have screened the electrostatics and changed the Debye length of these molecules and demonstrated a change in "recognition", at the very least.
In any case, I am quite suspicious of their conclusions, as many other biophysicists are.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right in many cases. Freshman chemistry course material doesn't change. Freshman math doesn't change. This is much less true for senior-level undergraduate and graduate courses.
However, the student isn't entirely helpless. My undergraduate profs didn't assign page numbers. They'd tell me to read the section on Gas Chromatography. They'd give me print-outs with problems and solutions. Students are also free to guide themselves in their readings. If you're worried about "new" material that you might miss in reading an older edition of the textbook -- in stark opposition to your point -- then ask the professor about it.
If the course is modeled such that you are *required* to buy a textbook, complain! Get the prof to photocopy and pass out these materials. They get budgets to do this.
I agree that this is all problematic. I'm arguing that torrents aren't the solution.
"With the average cost of textbooks going up every year, and with some books costing more than $100, some experts say that piracy will only increase."
It's not my intention to troll, but this certainly won't help the cost aspect of it. College textbooks are different from music CDs in their profit margin. They differ at least in the cost of production and the frequency of purchase. There has to be some justifiable reason for professors to write these books -- they need compensation for their time.
I'm not saying that publishers are not abusive in this respect. I'd much rather see government-sponsored textbooks (textbook grants) or independent publishing.
There needs to be a solution to this problem, and I'm quite sure that this will not have the desired long-term effect.
sorry to reply to my own post. I accidentally didn't format the linux MD RAID 10 driver page correctly :
driver page.
Also, it may not have been evident from my post, but this is all through software RAID. It is also my understanding that this RAID 10 mode is less CPU intensive than RAID 5, but this isn't much of an issue with today's fast, multi-core processors.
Just to add a bit of information to this post. I believe the RAID mode this poster is talking about is indeed RAID 10 and not RAID 1+0 or 0+1 -- stripped mirrors or mirrored stripes. This new RAID mode is supported by the linux md driver.
Linux MD RAID 10 driver page.
This RAID mode does not require an even number of discs. My understanding is that writes are much faster with RAID 10 than RAID 5 because parity checks are not necessary. However, this RAID10 mode gives you only half of your total RAID size, and RAID 5 gives you your total RAID size minus one drive in capacity.
Some useful, more detailed (and likely more accurate) information
Some performance comparison results to RAID 5. It would appear that the read performance is close to RAID 0, and the write performance is close to RAID 0 divided by two -- because every write has to be done twice. Furthermore, RAID10 can be more robust for drive failure.
That should have been :
<flamebait>make courses harder so that only few students survive</flamebait>
That's exactly what happens to comp sci students that graduate without learning the material.
[Your] best bet now is to get a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that have an unusually good range, and some of the Logitechs seem to qualify, but it's a gamble.
Seems to me that the authors of this study were heavy beer drinkers.
I spend considerably more than 5 bucks on music a month. If I'm paying to download music off the net, I suspect that I may be less motivated to pay more than 5 bucks a month for music.
I've always felt this way about hemeopathy and alternative medecine. I was married to a woman that believed and used hemeopathic mixtures and alternative medical techniques like colonics. In my mind, endorsing these products and ideas is as silly as believing that the earth is flat. In any case, we discussed how homeopathy works -- serial dilution to increase the potency of natural products that induce various ailments -- as well as the dangers of alternative medicine, and she stopped using these methods. I think it becomes problematic when your partner deliberately continues to subscribe to a way of thinking that he/she knows is blatantly contradictory to modern science.
Well because there's a point when it becomes too expensive. Where is that threshold. 10 billion, 100 billion, 1 trillion, 10 trillion? As an academic, I'm certainly in favour of research pursuits that satisfy intellectual rather than practical questions. Learning for the sake of learning is fun and important. Academics have to be realistic too. In funding decisions -- where money is limited -- intellectual projects are necessarily secondary to practical ones.
I don't disagree that going to Mars would be cool. There would undoubtedly be new technological advances that would be useful in other fields -- although arguably, we could tackle those problems and develop the technologies directly. However, at what point does it cost too much?
It's not clear to me what benefits we'd get in trying to get humans to Mars.
Presumably, the technologies developed could be used in many other areas, but why not develop technologies for those problems/needs directly? What can't we learn from automated robots? Would that money be better spent elsewhere? (Admittedly, I work in health research, and I'm biased.).
Going to Mars would be very cool, but I'd imagine that it would require considerable resources. Is it really worth it?
Users couldn't figure out how to decrypt it until they figured out that the music was suppose to sound like that.
ok, bad joke. I've got a bad case of the Mondays.
I'm always suspicious whenever I see ostensibly "high-impact" summaries that link to press releases of work that is either unpublished or published in low impact journals. In this case, I haven't looked up the impact factor of the journal PLoS pathogens (article), but I do biophysics research on HIV and I've never heard of this journal. As a useful general rule, science articles shouldn't appear on here (and waste everyone's time) unless they've been submitted through a peer-reviewed journal (not the case here), and I think they should hit high-impact journals like Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, ...
I have a much more simple explanation. Players like it because it means that they're not being ignored. Having "friends" that pay attention to you is a huge plus for geeks.
C-x C-c, RMS. C-x C-c.
Whoever says that Klingons can't resolve things in a civilized manner are clearly wrong.
Thankfully, they found him.
You're right. The intention here is not to create new proteins, but to tag DNA and possibly create new DNA nanostructures. At the end of the day, mRNAs that are translated to proteins still will only have access to the same set of tRNAs, and therefore, the same 20 amino-acids.
The article can be found here. [PDF download requires a subscription]
A more interesting discovery (in my opinion) -- from the Scripps Institute -- was made about ~10-15 years ago (IIRC) by Pete Schultz's group. They modified tRNAs so that specific codons (DNA/RNA triplets) could incorporate chemically-modified amino-acids into a protein. Some of this has led to interesting work on protein tagging, functional studies as well as the study of molecular evolution. All this is done with in vitro translation, as far as I know.
You misunderstood the conclusion they're trying to push from the result. (This isn't surprising because the summary didn't get the article.)
As you've stated, DNA molecules that open up and close will more likely hybridize with molecules with a similar sequence. It's basic thermodynamics. The more complementary hydrogen bonds you can make between the bases of two DNA molecules, the more stable that molecule will be, and therefore, there will be a much greater population of that combination of DNA molecules in solution. Site directed mutagenesis works on this principle.
What they're proposing in this article is that you have DNA molecules that recognize each others sequences without opening up. Two double stranded DNA molecules (dsDNA) *recognize* each other without seeing each other's bases -- purely an electrostatic effect and not a hydrogen-bonding effect. In B-form DNA, the bases are hidden by the DNA backbone, and their conclusion strikes many people (including myself) as crazy. I have another post that elaborates on this.
I was quite suspicious of their claim, so I read the original article.
The claim is that long DNA molecules (200bp) that have double helix structure (dsDNA) can "detect" each other over long distances -- as long as nanometers. Their claim is that sequence specific electrostatic type interactions -- which scale as 1/r -- lead to such recognition. Since the base interactions themselves are through H-bonds, the claim is that the base-pairs have subtle effects on the phosphodiester backbone (and the counter-ions around them) such that identical dsDNA molecules can recognize each other electrostatically without opening up. As stated in their introduction, this is quite controversial.
DNA molecules already "recognize" themselves by opening up and hybridizing, and the lower energy molecular pairs -- i.e. sequence matched strands -- are more populated than mismatched molecules. They try to address this : "We consider it to be rather unlikely in this instance, since the probability of bubble formation in unstressed linear DNA of the studied length is very small in contrast to the case where topological strain is relieved by bubble formation in small circular DNA molecules."
I'm not so sure that I would rule this option out because even partial hybridization changes the diffusivity constants of ssDNA/dsDNA molecules, which could lead to "pockets" of higher local concentration. I'm surprised that this wasn't elaborated more carefully, and that reviewers didn't jump all over this. Furthermore, I think they should have screened the electrostatics and changed the Debye length of these molecules and demonstrated a change in "recognition", at the very least.
In any case, I am quite suspicious of their conclusions, as many other biophysicists are.
Presumably they didn't use a 64-bit integer to save on bandwidth costs.
I happen to "google" myself in the shower every morning, but it's not exactly newsworthy.