another important item would be passwords and logins to things that might be useful (ie computers with more data passwords your wife might not know etc.)
I have always wondered what would happen to all my data on my computers if I died suddenly. There is a lot of important personal info that my family might like to have just in case.
This was recently sent out to NASA employees and I have copied it directly. The only thing changed is the name and contact info for "Point of Contact" have been removed. I tend to believe that he is the kind of guy that doesn't really think the two huge centerpeices of NASA tech are blunders or mistakes.
Point of Contact: D*** A*****, Public Affairs, 202/***-***
Message from the Administrator
I'm sure you've seen the press coverage concerning my supposed comments on the space shuttle and International Space Station, beginning last Wednesday. I've been in Russia since the day the article came out, and have therefore missed most of the reaction to it, but I've received enough e-mail to realize that I didn't handle the situation well and have left some hurt feelings behind. So, I thought I should make the effort to clarify the situation, and this e-mail to all of you is the best way I know to do it.
The attention-getting parts of the story were, of course, associated with the use of words such as "mistake" and "blunder" in connection with the shuttle and station programs. The press coverage has been such as to make it appear that I used those words to characterize the programs. In fact -- and I would hope that this goes without saying -- I did no such thing. I was asked by an interviewer if shuttle had been "a mistake," and I provided my answer, which addressed the difficulty of the design challenge and the paucity of funds with which it was undertaken. This answer was given in the article, and was quoted correctly. But the use of words such as "mistake" and "blunder," as well as the overall pejorative tone of the article, was not reflective of my remarks nor of the general context of the discussion.
At the strategic level, I think all of you know that I believe we have been restricted to low Earth orbit for far too long and that the proper focus of our nation's space program should be the exploration of our solar system. I do understand that others will disagree. In that context, it is useful to recall Norm Augustine's observation that most people believe we should have a robust space program; it is just that no two people agree as to what that program should be! But it is my sense that this debate has been had and has been resolved for the time being. The Vision for Space Exploration is the right path, and it is the path that we are re-engaging our agency to follow. I am committed to it.
With that said, I do hope you know that I would never speak of our efforts, past or present, in a way that would be intended to denigrate the efforts of the engineers, technicians, managers, scientists, and administrative personnel who "make it happen" at NASA and at our contractors.
As I have often said publicly, the shuttle is the most amazing machine humans have ever built, and it has been the recipient of the most brilliant engineering that America can provide. The station is a more difficult engineering project, by far, than was Apollo. It is true that we have not met our original goals for these programs, for myriad reasons dating back 35 years or more, involving strategic and budgetary decisions made, properly or otherwise, above NASA. Although this is not the fault of the dedicated people, past and present, who have worked in these programs, I think we all know that we can do better, and that we will. But even if everything were in our favor -- and it is not -- it would be several years before we could have available a successor to the shuttle. In the interim, we must complete the station and the only tool with which we can accomplish that is the shuttle. At this point, an expeditious but orderly phase-out of the shuttle program, using it to complete the assembly of the station while we develop a new system, is the best thing we can do for our agency and for the nation.
These are the messages I have tried to convey. It is not my intention
....If the US disappeared off the face of the map tomorrow? Hmmmm what would that be like.
"Well I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords"
"You're right down with ICANN and up with the glorious Interior Ministry of Internet Regulation and Sanitization"
--or--
"Crap... all those root DNS servers were in the US weren't they... thats really all gone? Dang."
--or--
"So what movies are out? Bollywood eh?"
--or--
"WTF D00D why cant I l0gin to WoW!?!?"
Anyway you are probably right no one would miss us except for a lot of immigrants, political refugees, and the people that receive our foreign aid but eh... I never cared much for them anyway.
See the real problem is that there is absolutely no proof of CAUSATION. They would like us to believe that because someone is morally corrupt they illegally download music and also participate in other more reprehensible acts. What they have shown is a CORRELATION. There may be data (although I doubt the validity) showing that people who download music also steal and/or cheat more often than your average person.
HOWEVER the big problem is that they may have NOTHING to do with each other. This may be a trend only because more young people download music and you generally don't see a lot of middle class 40 somethings cheating in school or shoplifting. They specifically mention in the article that illegal downloading is most common amongst people under the age of 24 and no mention is made at all on how they compare rates of shoplifting or cheating.
As someone who works in science I am constantly amazed at the number of studies that people gete all worked up over that show basic lame CORRELATIONS without and hint at CAUSATION. I bet you could find that people who illegally download music also are more likely to thing that skateboarding is cool. Does that mean that somehow illegal music downloading is linked to skating? No it most likely means that old people that have enough money to buy music (unlike Johnny highschool who get $20 a week for lunch... which by the way is only slightly less than the price of a CD).
So before I get to "ranty" I just hate people that show correlation and then get written up as if they have shown causation.
I give you enormous credit for using the term "straw man." It is far and away my favorite rhetorical device and aptly used here. (For those that dont know: rhetorical use)
I think the biggest factor for me is not necessarily that the company I work for (research institution) is directly interested in my satisfaction. It is that they are directly interested in getting work done and they know that means that I have to be taken care of so I don't burn out. They certainly don't pay me better than any other place.
The big pull for me is that I get direct input from my boss. No memos, no hints, no second hand info. The group I work with is small and my boss works with us. So if I screw up he tells me if I do a good job he lets me know. This also allows me to have a perspective on how I fit in to the whole project. I think the only thing worse than not being appreciated is not being appreciated and not knowing whether your work means anything.
Once you lose sight of the importance of what you do... where is the incentive?
This is definitely the right way to look at it. People may not have a vote in a company that they buy from, but the best way to influence a company is with your checkbook. If Sony won't sell CD's without DRM then don't buy DRM'd CDs. Let them take the hit if they want to jerk you around. If all the big labels start DRMing stuff then someone will offer un-DRM'd stuff to fill the hole in the market. It's not the best solution but it is how capitalism works. Its not like we are renting the music from a label we are buying and as such we have the control over the content. IF a label wants to rent me music then they can kiss my a** and money goodbye.
If anything this will make it worse in North Korea, the government will see what is happening in places like China and make sure nobody but the elite of the elite even get internet access at all, let alone unfiltered access.
The sad thing is that this may be true. While Thomas Paine may have had an easy time of printing leaflets against the rule of King George despite any crack downs by the government, internet access requires a lot more infrastructure in most cases. With more requirements for expensive infrastructure it becomes easier for the government to repress. I would like nothing more than watching the people of North Korea rise up and denounce Kim Jong-Il and that entire f-ed up government, but it seems unlikely without some kind of outside intervention. Maybe the US should park ships off the NK border and implement a little Wi-Max and drop laptops the way we dropped food in Afghanistan. But then again folks at home might have problems with their children getting killed airlifting internet access into North Korea.
Well free trade may be the thing that really blows China open a little. People with a lot of technology and consumer comfort tend to be the ones that get pissed off about things like... repressive government. While people struggling to live are more worried about things like... food.
I am truly, before anything else, a proponent of personal freedoms. I know that this is definitely something that is common in technology communities. I am really heartened by an article like this.
The only question is how much impact will a blog have on a repressive government like China (or worse N. Korea... if blogging is even possible there). Will the next Thomas Paine be a blogger?
If 50% of people are using their blog for therapy is it working? Are people that blog about personal problems etc. more or less likely to deal with them well? Id it simply enough to believe that you are helping yourself? Is it a mind over matter deal or is it a placebo effect? Is blogging just another form of self medication (like my favorite... drinking instead of blogging) that is not really helping and only delaying getting real help?
My personal thought is that blogging is a good way for people to deal with their day to day neuroses that probably aren't bad enough to see a psychoanalyst about. I personally write for two blogs. One we review music and movies and put up interesting tidbits and I will be running a podcast from it. The other is purely a message board for a group of friends to keep in contact.
You mean like one of three people in the suburban US that get plague.
Its still endemic in a lot of parts of the world and there are even small outbreaks in the southwestern US every now and then. The reason we don't get a lot of it around here is because we generally have good sanitation and don't have hordes of rats roaming around (i.e. Europe in the middle ages).
I work on the same floor as one of the regional, federal bioterrorism labs on the south side of Chicago and unless there are a lot of McDonalds with biometric access restrictions (thumbprints) combined with individual employee keypad codes I think the security at most BSL3 labs trumps McDonalds. That is all besides the negative pressure double doors and decontamination showers.
Well that is a little unfair. There are a lot of considerations that while they may not make your code any better, will sure make you feel a lot more comfortable while you do it. Being cursed with being the son of a hand surgeon I know a lot of useless fact about repetative stress injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome. Almost all kind of injuries like that are fixed by ergonmic improvements ranging from getting a track ball, to having the right chair.
And what good are paper and pencils if you are crammed in some corner on a small desk. I always study/work better when I have lots of space. Its not a high $$$ solution but I have my computer/workspace on two 6' long folding tables in an L shape. That leaves plenty of room for the very useful dual monitor setup (which I find is a real boone for my productivity) and plenty of table real estate for books, notebooks, manuals, etc. etc.
Basically I understand that as you get older and it starts to be a pain to sit in a folding chair at a cramped desk it helps a lot to have a nice setup (which is going to cost a littel extra).
My biggest advice is plenty of space, a good chair, and a second work area like an armchair or couch if you need to take a break from the screen for a while.
This is definitely true and I can say as someone working in cellular biology/microbiology there is an enormous push by a lot of research organizations to get researchers to write peices explaing things like Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. Basically universities and research institutions want to make sure that some logic is thrown in the otherwise purely political malestorm of opinion (not science or really even logic)
It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science.
Right: That is all true. Except the mechanism is still unknown. At first it was thought that using siRNA (silencing RNA) to completely complement mRNA(messenger RNA) caused that combination to be degraded because the host cell has defenses against the double stranded RNA used by many viruses. However, siRNA's as short as 15 or so bases can cause mRNA of several hundreds of bases to be degraded. Also there is shRNA (short hairpin RNA) which is a little loop of RNA that has some complementation to a target mRNA. So the process remains largely uncharachterized. Even stable RNAi knock downs can leave 5-30% of the original protein production. Which is very useful in many situations (and much easier/faster) but not the same as actually removing the DNA copy of the gene that encodes a protein (or a knock out) which leave no protein expression.
Its interesting that you mention HCV because that is exactly what my lab is working on. The problem with RNAi is that there no effective delivery method for humans.
RNAi signals the destruction of messenger RNA. However, it is not a 100% efficient so any protein being expressed is severely reduced. but since the DNA is still there in the genome there is always some expression.
ok as someone that works in this field let me say this:
RNAi is a very useful tool, but this is definitely several years behind the curve. RNA has been shown to regulate much more than previously thought. However talk about "the secret world of RNA" is pretty much like claiming that there is a "secret world of open source software." Neither one is very secret or very new.
The biggest contention I have is this quote from the article: "This knack of completely eliminating a protein makes RNAi a valuable research tool." This is wrong, because RNAi does not work like this at all. This is actually one of the drawbacks to using RNAi to eliminate proteins. It does not eliminate, it reduces. To get rid of a certain protein, the classic method is to completely remove the DNA that codes that protein from the organism studied. This is referred to as a "knock out" because the organism has no ability to make that proteind from the removed DNA. RNAi however, provides only a "knock down" because the DNA is still there and no matter how much RNAi is used there is still some expression of the protein. Also, many RNAi protocols are transient supressors not permanent knock outs of protein.
So basically this is an exciting new field but don't necessarily believe all the hype because this is no miracle answer. The article is good, but oversimplified.
I really don't consider lying in this case to be particularly evil. I am pretty sure that 147,000 geeks being vidicated with a chorus of "ha I knew it all along, Google can't fool me" is actually doing some good for the community's collective ego.
..was my girlfriend setting up a new Shuttle box for the first time that I built for her. She has an external Maxtor HD. The older Maxtor power cords happen to have an S-Video plug interface on one end. This caused her to boot the computer with 10V a or so power cord going into the S-video out across the 3.5V moherboard. After the new motherboard and PSU that were required the repair was about the same as the original cost of the box.
You think that Maxtor would have engineered that one a little better.
Slashdot Mirror
another important item would be passwords and logins to things that might be useful (ie computers with more data passwords your wife might not know etc.)
I have always wondered what would happen to all my data on my computers if I died suddenly. There is a lot of important personal info that my family might like to have just in case.
This was recently sent out to NASA employees and I have copied it directly. The only thing changed is the name and contact info for "Point of Contact" have been removed. I tend to believe that he is the kind of guy that doesn't really think the two huge centerpeices of NASA tech are blunders or mistakes.
Point of Contact: D*** A*****, Public Affairs, 202/***-***
Message from the Administrator
I'm sure you've seen the press coverage concerning my supposed comments on
the space shuttle and International Space Station, beginning last Wednesday.
I've been in Russia since the day the article came out, and have therefore
missed most of the reaction to it, but I've received enough e-mail to
realize that I didn't handle the situation well and have left some hurt
feelings behind. So, I thought I should make the effort to clarify the
situation, and this e-mail to all of you is the best way I know to do it.
The attention-getting parts of the story were, of course, associated with
the use of words such as "mistake" and "blunder" in connection with the
shuttle and station programs. The press coverage has been such as to make it
appear that I used those words to characterize the programs. In fact -- and
I would hope that this goes without saying -- I did no such thing. I was
asked by an interviewer if shuttle had been "a mistake," and I provided my
answer, which addressed the difficulty of the design challenge and the
paucity of funds with which it was undertaken. This answer was given in the
article, and was quoted correctly. But the use of words such as "mistake"
and "blunder," as well as the overall pejorative tone of the article, was
not reflective of my remarks nor of the general context of the discussion.
At the strategic level, I think all of you know that I believe we have been
restricted to low Earth orbit for far too long and that the proper focus of
our nation's space program should be the exploration of our solar system. I
do understand that others will disagree. In that context, it is useful to
recall Norm Augustine's observation that most people believe we should have
a robust space program; it is just that no two people agree as to what that
program should be! But it is my sense that this debate has been had and has
been resolved for the time being. The Vision for Space Exploration is the
right path, and it is the path that we are re-engaging our agency to follow.
I am committed to it.
With that said, I do hope you know that I would never speak of our efforts,
past or present, in a way that would be intended to denigrate the efforts of
the engineers, technicians, managers, scientists, and administrative
personnel who "make it happen" at NASA and at our contractors.
As I have often said publicly, the shuttle is the most amazing machine
humans have ever built, and it has been the recipient of the most brilliant
engineering that America can provide. The station is a more difficult
engineering project, by far, than was Apollo. It is true that we have not
met our original goals for these programs, for myriad reasons dating back 35
years or more, involving strategic and budgetary decisions made, properly or
otherwise, above NASA. Although this is not the fault of the dedicated
people, past and present, who have worked in these programs, I think we all
know that we can do better, and that we will. But even if everything were
in our favor -- and it is not -- it would be several years before we could
have available a successor to the shuttle. In the interim, we must complete
the station and the only tool with which we can accomplish that is the
shuttle. At this point, an expeditious but orderly phase-out of the shuttle
program, using it to complete the assembly of the station while we develop a
new system, is the best thing we can do for our agency and for the nation.
These are the messages I have tried to convey. It is not my intention
That is more than half... so I rounded up
....If the US disappeared off the face of the map tomorrow? Hmmmm what would that be like. "Well I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords" "You're right down with ICANN and up with the glorious Interior Ministry of Internet Regulation and Sanitization" --or-- "Crap... all those root DNS servers were in the US weren't they... thats really all gone? Dang." --or-- "So what movies are out? Bollywood eh?" --or-- "WTF D00D why cant I l0gin to WoW!?!?" Anyway you are probably right no one would miss us except for a lot of immigrants, political refugees, and the people that receive our foreign aid but eh... I never cared much for them anyway.
See the real problem is that there is absolutely no proof of CAUSATION. They would like us to believe that because someone is morally corrupt they illegally download music and also participate in other more reprehensible acts. What they have shown is a CORRELATION. There may be data (although I doubt the validity) showing that people who download music also steal and/or cheat more often than your average person.
HOWEVER the big problem is that they may have NOTHING to do with each other. This may be a trend only because more young people download music and you generally don't see a lot of middle class 40 somethings cheating in school or shoplifting. They specifically mention in the article that illegal downloading is most common amongst people under the age of 24 and no mention is made at all on how they compare rates of shoplifting or cheating.
As someone who works in science I am constantly amazed at the number of studies that people gete all worked up over that show basic lame CORRELATIONS without and hint at CAUSATION. I bet you could find that people who illegally download music also are more likely to thing that skateboarding is cool. Does that mean that somehow illegal music downloading is linked to skating? No it most likely means that old people that have enough money to buy music (unlike Johnny highschool who get $20 a week for lunch... which by the way is only slightly less than the price of a CD).
So before I get to "ranty" I just hate people that show correlation and then get written up as if they have shown causation.
I give you enormous credit for using the term "straw man." It is far and away my favorite rhetorical device and aptly used here. (For those that dont know: rhetorical use)
I think the biggest factor for me is not necessarily that the company I work for (research institution) is directly interested in my satisfaction. It is that they are directly interested in getting work done and they know that means that I have to be taken care of so I don't burn out. They certainly don't pay me better than any other place.
The big pull for me is that I get direct input from my boss. No memos, no hints, no second hand info. The group I work with is small and my boss works with us. So if I screw up he tells me if I do a good job he lets me know. This also allows me to have a perspective on how I fit in to the whole project. I think the only thing worse than not being appreciated is not being appreciated and not knowing whether your work means anything.
Once you lose sight of the importance of what you do... where is the incentive?
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you. -- C.G. Jung
Oh I thought this might be a job for.... Ace Ventura, pet detective? (too old school?)
This is definitely the right way to look at it. People may not have a vote in a company that they buy from, but the best way to influence a company is with your checkbook. If Sony won't sell CD's without DRM then don't buy DRM'd CDs. Let them take the hit if they want to jerk you around. If all the big labels start DRMing stuff then someone will offer un-DRM'd stuff to fill the hole in the market. It's not the best solution but it is how capitalism works. Its not like we are renting the music from a label we are buying and as such we have the control over the content. IF a label wants to rent me music then they can kiss my a** and money goodbye.
If anything this will make it worse in North Korea, the government will see what is happening in places like China and make sure nobody but the elite of the elite even get internet access at all, let alone unfiltered access.
The sad thing is that this may be true. While Thomas Paine may have had an easy time of printing leaflets against the rule of King George despite any crack downs by the government, internet access requires a lot more infrastructure in most cases. With more requirements for expensive infrastructure it becomes easier for the government to repress. I would like nothing more than watching the people of North Korea rise up and denounce Kim Jong-Il and that entire f-ed up government, but it seems unlikely without some kind of outside intervention. Maybe the US should park ships off the NK border and implement a little Wi-Max and drop laptops the way we dropped food in Afghanistan. But then again folks at home might have problems with their children getting killed airlifting internet access into North Korea.
Well free trade may be the thing that really blows China open a little. People with a lot of technology and consumer comfort tend to be the ones that get pissed off about things like... repressive government. While people struggling to live are more worried about things like... food.
I am truly, before anything else, a proponent of personal freedoms. I know that this is definitely something that is common in technology communities. I am really heartened by an article like this.
The only question is how much impact will a blog have on a repressive government like China (or worse N. Korea... if blogging is even possible there). Will the next Thomas Paine be a blogger?
If 50% of people are using their blog for therapy is it working? Are people that blog about personal problems etc. more or less likely to deal with them well? Id it simply enough to believe that you are helping yourself? Is it a mind over matter deal or is it a placebo effect? Is blogging just another form of self medication (like my favorite... drinking instead of blogging) that is not really helping and only delaying getting real help?
My personal thought is that blogging is a good way for people to deal with their day to day neuroses that probably aren't bad enough to see a psychoanalyst about. I personally write for two blogs. One we review music and movies and put up interesting tidbits and I will be running a podcast from it. The other is purely a message board for a group of friends to keep in contact.
You mean like one of three people in the suburban US that get plague. Its still endemic in a lot of parts of the world and there are even small outbreaks in the southwestern US every now and then. The reason we don't get a lot of it around here is because we generally have good sanitation and don't have hordes of rats roaming around (i.e. Europe in the middle ages).
I work on the same floor as one of the regional, federal bioterrorism labs on the south side of Chicago and unless there are a lot of McDonalds with biometric access restrictions (thumbprints) combined with individual employee keypad codes I think the security at most BSL3 labs trumps McDonalds. That is all besides the negative pressure double doors and decontamination showers.
Well that is a little unfair. There are a lot of considerations that while they may not make your code any better, will sure make you feel a lot more comfortable while you do it. Being cursed with being the son of a hand surgeon I know a lot of useless fact about repetative stress injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome. Almost all kind of injuries like that are fixed by ergonmic improvements ranging from getting a track ball, to having the right chair.
And what good are paper and pencils if you are crammed in some corner on a small desk. I always study/work better when I have lots of space. Its not a high $$$ solution but I have my computer/workspace on two 6' long folding tables in an L shape. That leaves plenty of room for the very useful dual monitor setup (which I find is a real boone for my productivity) and plenty of table real estate for books, notebooks, manuals, etc. etc.
Basically I understand that as you get older and it starts to be a pain to sit in a folding chair at a cramped desk it helps a lot to have a nice setup (which is going to cost a littel extra).
My biggest advice is plenty of space, a good chair, and a second work area like an armchair or couch if you need to take a break from the screen for a while.
This is definitely true and I can say as someone working in cellular biology/microbiology there is an enormous push by a lot of research organizations to get researchers to write peices explaing things like Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. Basically universities and research institutions want to make sure that some logic is thrown in the otherwise purely political malestorm of opinion (not science or really even logic)
Right: That is all true. Except the mechanism is still unknown. At first it was thought that using siRNA (silencing RNA) to completely complement mRNA(messenger RNA) caused that combination to be degraded because the host cell has defenses against the double stranded RNA used by many viruses. However, siRNA's as short as 15 or so bases can cause mRNA of several hundreds of bases to be degraded. Also there is shRNA (short hairpin RNA) which is a little loop of RNA that has some complementation to a target mRNA. So the process remains largely uncharachterized. Even stable RNAi knock downs can leave 5-30% of the original protein production. Which is very useful in many situations (and much easier/faster) but not the same as actually removing the DNA copy of the gene that encodes a protein (or a knock out) which leave no protein expression.
Its interesting that you mention HCV because that is exactly what my lab is working on. The problem with RNAi is that there no effective delivery method for humans.
RNAi signals the destruction of messenger RNA. However, it is not a 100% efficient so any protein being expressed is severely reduced. but since the DNA is still there in the genome there is always some expression.
ok as someone that works in this field let me say this:
RNAi is a very useful tool, but this is definitely several years behind the curve. RNA has been shown to regulate much more than previously thought. However talk about "the secret world of RNA" is pretty much like claiming that there is a "secret world of open source software." Neither one is very secret or very new.
The biggest contention I have is this quote from the article: "This knack of completely eliminating a protein makes RNAi a valuable research tool." This is wrong, because RNAi does not work like this at all. This is actually one of the drawbacks to using RNAi to eliminate proteins. It does not eliminate, it reduces. To get rid of a certain protein, the classic method is to completely remove the DNA that codes that protein from the organism studied. This is referred to as a "knock out" because the organism has no ability to make that proteind from the removed DNA. RNAi however, provides only a "knock down" because the DNA is still there and no matter how much RNAi is used there is still some expression of the protein. Also, many RNAi protocols are transient supressors not permanent knock outs of protein.
So basically this is an exciting new field but don't necessarily believe all the hype because this is no miracle answer. The article is good, but oversimplified.
I really don't consider lying in this case to be particularly evil. I am pretty sure that 147,000 geeks being vidicated with a chorus of "ha I knew it all along, Google can't fool me" is actually doing some good for the community's collective ego.
..was my girlfriend setting up a new Shuttle box for the first time that I built for her. She has an external Maxtor HD. The older Maxtor power cords happen to have an S-Video plug interface on one end. This caused her to boot the computer with 10V a or so power cord going into the S-video out across the 3.5V moherboard. After the new motherboard and PSU that were required the repair was about the same as the original cost of the box.
You think that Maxtor would have engineered that one a little better.