http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/images/kepler10_1.html
Has gotta be the NASA version of photoshop
On the other hand, for all the gazillions of dollars going into this project, they seem to have outsourced web design and layout to some undergrads, so maybe the same people did the image
People like the articles' author seem to forget that "science" covers a lot of territory, and it is done by scientists - who are humans, with all the flaws and variation and abilities of humans.
If you look at the diverse array of activities and people who do science, it is hard to believe that any single "theory" will accomodate all that
Quote " especially since I got a bonus this year-end that is burning a hole in my pocket. "
We got 10 -20% unemployment, depending on what numbers you believe, which has been getting worse every month since O got elected; we got deficits, we got a technology competiton we are loosing with Asia,,,and you want to buy a smart phone
how about you take the bonus and figure out how to get Chinese to spend their remimbi on stupid gadgets made in america - at least someone will have a job
and don't tell me to lighten up...
since the meaning of words changes dramatically over time, perhaps the word "nigger" circa 1880 is equivalent to the word "slave" 2010
Personally, I think it is more important to teach children to understand that the past, while not even over, is different, and that (unlike the GOP, which is a cargo cult looking to restore some golden age) interpreting the past, or a text, requires judgement and skill, and that reasonable people can have differences.
I don't know about digital magazines, but most websites have boring content, poor contrast between background and text, and the webpage is not sized correctly for todays widescreen monitors.
Also, many webpages have a small amount of content lost in a sea of unrelated links, ranging from poorly placed ads to intrusive social media bookmarking toolbars to lists of other columns/blogs
I would say the hunger for something interesting to read is as great as ever, the quality and
layout
are not very good
To take an example, the New York Times has crisp, readable type, in a layout that is easy for the user; this took only, say, 200 years to figure out, so give slate a break
If you are outside the field, there is no way that you can describe in a few pages (the limit for most journals, esp prestigious ones) enough detail to let some one actually duplicate your experiment (assuming it can be duplicated - not everyone can afford to build a hubble, or a fermilab or a 500 Mhz NMR; or that you can gain access to and maintain specialiez cell lines or transgenic mice))
If you are in the field it is also silly; if you really need all the nitty gritty details, you call or email the authors and say, hey, these points here, what exactly do you mean...
this idea that you should describe enough detail to allow someone else to reproduce your work is one of those comforting hoary myths from 18th century england...Dobzhanski says somewhere that when he started in genetics, he could claim to have at least looked at every single paper ever published in the field, but that even a few years later, this was impossible...
People tend to forget that science is done by scientists, who vary in quality, and have up and down weeks and years....
(even T Woods or M Jordan or R Stallmann has a bad day)
as for the ionnidis article, I would be very surprised if more then 2 or 3 slashdotters know enough statistics to comment; I do know that I have looked at the article, and it is incomprehensible; further the article has been severly criticised by other statisticians (forgive the spelling)
There is empirical data to suggest that the problem is that most science is just bad or worthless; since it is worthless, no one bothers to check if it is right or wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can't reproduce it.
The data is citation counts; something like half of all papers are cited zero or one times - that means that a for a substantial fraction of the published science, no one bothers to follow up. this is data from the ISI, which publishes the science citation index, a very valuable tool for anyone doing science.
there are 3 independent claims, 1, 10, and 18
1 is below
It is a bit hard to follow, but claim language is the precise definition of what the patent covers; if you have something that omits only one of the items below, then you are not infringing
Given the many, many steps in the claim 1, I don't see it having much value - for instance, the claim language says that there will be guidelines for IP counsel; if you did everything exactly as the IBM patent said, but omitted this step, you would not be infringing.
1. A computerized system for an intellectual property (IP) framework, including:a strategic planning computer module for formulating business strategies for creating and managing inventions and IP rights, said strategic planning module including at least one electronic database having data for formulating said business strategies;an invent computer module for managing creation of said inventions based on said business strategies;an IP creation computer module for determining value of said inventions and creating an IP portfolio, said creating of said IP portfolio including creating said IP rights based on said determining of said value and said business strategies;an IP administration computer module for managing said IP rights based on said business strategies including extension, maintenance and retirement of said IP rights, measuring performance of said business strategies, creating and modifying budgets, and setting guidelines for IP counsel;a defend computer module for defending against infringements and invalidations of said IP rights based on said business strategies and monitoring market and competitor actions to develop risk management plans;an influence computer module including a standards influencing unit, a legal and regulatory influencing unit, and a policy influencing unit; anda capitalize computer module for identifying potential licensees and potential assignees of said IP rights, and managing licensing negotiations, cross-licensing negotiations, and assignment negotiations based on said business strategies,said business strategies provided by said strategic planning computer module being input into at least one of said invent computer module, said IP creation computer module, said IP administration computer module, said defend computer module, said influence computer module, and said capitalize computer module,said inventions provided by said invent computer module being input into said IP creation computer module, andsaid IP rights provided by said IP creation computer module being input into at least one of said IP administration computer module, said defend computer module, said influence computer module, and said capitalize computer module.
original ball: 25 Watt Light bulbs
Now: Luxeon Rebel LEDs
It is the "luxeon rebel" part that really bothers me , indicative of the overwhelming pressure to put advertising everywhere at all times
Membrane - very thin sheet or plate
Pore - a small hole in the sheet
current - ions (atoms such as sodium or chloride) per second; in a salt solution, current is carried between the electrodes (usually Platinum wire, or graphite) thru the liquid by ions; these ions have a size of roughly 1 angstrom, so they are, compared to electrons, really big.
when we measure the current, we are simply measuring the number of ions/second going thru the pore; if the pore has ~ the size of a DNA moleucle, then it seems obvious tht when the DNA fills the pore; fewer ions can go thru, so the current will drop
As the authors state (editied)
In a typical nanopore experiment, biological molecules are..driven through a nanopore by an electric field. This results in a drop of the current across the pore.
From this, information on molecular properties such as length, composition can be extracted.
With DNA, it may be possilbe to get seq data Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art detection based on
ionic current blockade or fluorescence spectroscopy seems to lack the spatial and temporal resolution necessary to
obtain structural information at the single base level.
An alternative method based on tunneling perpendicular to the DNA backbone has been proposed to alleviate these limitations.
Due to its quantum mechanical origin, the tunneling current
decays rapidly with distance leading to enhanced spatial
resolution and better molecular specificity (ability to tell which base is moving thru the pore)
not entirely correct; the short strands can be up to 100 bases long (although caruthers has just published new chemistry for longer stuff) but you can make lots of them, so assembling (done in e coli, not yeast) something that is upto a few thousand bp long is pretty standard
however, assembling a mammalian genome is way beyond curren technology, for lots of reasons (you have to get the DNA into the cell, packaged into chromatin, etc)
You have some data to back this up ?
You have some real data to back this up, like some detailed comparison of 40 problems, with 20 solved by prize method and 20 solved by some other method ?
I don't know if prizes are good or not; I know that argument by anecdote (x prize foundation....) is not a good substitute for thinking
There is also a difference between a "solution" and a "solution" - it is easy to get something to work once for the prize committee; a lot harder to make it work many times, at a reasonable cost.
As a liberal, I find complaints about healthcare hypocritical, without similar complaints about no child left behind and the patriot act
NCLB is particularly odious to any traditionalist, as primary education has long been the purview of the states
Beyond that, there is something narrow minded and picky about the objections; how on earth can you actually run a country if every single thing has to be spelled out ?
You recall that seen in a few good men, wiht tom cruise and j nicholson, where cruise asks about regs and the mess hall ?
George Bush said if your spouse is not a citizen, he could break into yoiur house, steal your kids, send them to a foreign prision to be torturted and you object to.....a health car bill ?
That doesn't mean the bill is good; it just means that picking on obamacare, and not NCLB or Patriot is hypocritical
anyone who actually works in industry knows that already, today, rapid prototyping is having an incredible, astonishing role in reducing lead times and costs
I was just on a project with a plastic widget that would have taken 3 weeks and 100s of dollars to machine; our partner made a prototype in 3 days (1 day to turn the rough drawing into a Solidworks drawing for our approval, two days to ge that into a tool path, make the part, and get if over to us); we evaluated it, suggested some changes (one hole turned out to be off by a few mm ) got another one two days later,...
we could do 4 cycles of refinement in 3 weeks, and most of that time was because I didn't get around to testing the part, not build time
We now have a beta to take to customers; we could do a rapid molding (protomold - check them out, I'm a customer; you get good injection molded parts about 3 grand for the mold and a buck or two per part) but it was easier to 3D print 100 parts
precision in any system, whether it be 3D printing, CNC maching, requires that something move with a precision commensurate with the precision of hte finished part, eg if you need a hole on your car windsheild wiper nozzle that is 0.1 +- 0.01 mm, then something needs to move with resolution and accuracy of ~ 0.001 mm
if you do this mechanically, with stepper motors and linear slides, it is still $$, esp in 5axis of movement. There ae cheap steppers, and gear belt (rubber belts with teeth) but those are sill $$ unless you get heal volume (the miracle of an HP printer is not that it does things with near micron precision, but that it does micron precision for a few bucks - that takes a lot of design and vol)
If you do this with some sort of light feed back system (like STM heads) still a lot of money
most of the other objections on this thread show a lack of reasonable extrapolation, eg the complaints about materials - when HP or Epson thinks they are going to sell 100 million 3D printers a year, cause kids are using them for school projects, or people use them to make models, the materials will become available
For instance, if you now plastic, you know that additives, like glass fibers, can impart a lot of stiffness; so you could imagine a 1,000 dollar 3D printer with 3 "inktanks" one with standard polyolefin like material, and one with stiffener, and one with hardener; you could drill and tap the hardened spots post build
Or, you could have two machines each 1,000 bucks - a 3D printer and a 4 or 5 axis CNC jobber
or you could have std metal parts (star nuts) that get embedded inthe plastic and allow for subsequent attachment of metals (eg, you have a simple 3D arm that puts a metal nut, with flanges for grip, into the part as it is built; you can use the metal nut to attach stuff on the built part
As a professional (PhD molecular biology) scientist, I think the starting point is this:
If true, this is the biggest discovery in biology since watson crick, because it really redefines fundamentals of chemistry for life.
This is different from life growing under what seems to us harsh conditions (very acid [pH 1], high temp(boiling water)) etc
Replacing phosphorus with Arsenic is really fundamental, because phosphorus is found in so many different molecules in the cell: in DNA, RNA, tRNA, ATP, phospho lipids, glycolytic intermediates, building blocks for isoprenoid compounds, etc etc; thus you really have to change a lot of very very basic things
As the saying goes, extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence.
The idea that the web will not be under gov't or corp control is silly, because the web is 50% hardware - billions of dollars of fiber optic and cisco routers and servers, and someone
has to pay for that stuff
and he who pays, rules.
Seriously, if yo have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in fiber optic cable, are you going to do anything that in any way interferes with your ability to make as much as possible ?
given the avg intelligence level of corp c suite excecs, that means many companies will try really stupid and obnoxious things, so even if web control is bad, alot of companies will try it
You really think a dis organized bunch of stallmanites can stand against Verizon ?
look at wall street and TARP; despite a national outcry that forced congress to vote down TARP I, they still got it passed, with no controls on wall street; the money boys got a trillion dollar gift to wall street, opposed by the vast majority of americans, thru congress. YOu think a bunch of stallmanites are going to have better success against the companies taht want web control ?
And all of you who put your faith in Obama: go and read the N Y Times story about excelon's nuclear waste dump; short story, excelon wanted to store nuclear wastge in a poor neighborhood that Obama represented early in his career; the people of this town turned to now U S Senator Obama, who promised them he would do all he could to stop this waste site. Obama went back to DC, cut a deal behind closed doors to allow the waste site, then denied he had cut a deal.
This shows a profound lack of understanding of how large corporations try to control markets.
The first thing you have to understand is that almost all large companies strive as hard as they can to remove the market from consideration - this is called "marketing" (as with most corp speak, it is newspeak, the opposite of what is intended). The goal of marketing is to make you buy stuff on silly things, like the label, rather then on what you need or what is best cost/price/function.
The second thing is that "the market" is all powerful and can fight marketing; rather it is a continual struggle; the maturity of hte market and the mumber of dominant players has a role.
IT is still possible for a faceook to spring up, but the web is so young - not even ateenager.
as the web matures and barriers to entrance become higher, power will shift away from us.
For instance, look at search engines: from what I understand, to start a new search enigne would require 10s, if not 100s of millions of dollars up front, for servers etc etc.
given that, people will only invest money in search engines that make money; user desires are secondary.
look at google: it does a really crappy job as a search engine (think about what you want out of a search engine, then compare to what you get; google gets a C- at best) and part of the reason it is crappy is because it exists to sell ads, rather then help
us
I know the slashdot crowd has this belief that openess and data are a good idea, but will that crowd be willing to change their mind if this turns out to be a bad idea ?
What will happen with this flood of data ?
well, very few people will actually go thru it; those who do are highly motivated - either paid searchers, hired, by say the brit equivalent of the Koch brothers, or cranks, or whatever
What ever they find, most of it will be unkown unless published by the media
so , in the end, you don't have this utopian vision of the citizenry rising up to the task of rooting out fraud and abuse; you have people like the republicans who claimed Obama was spending 200 million dollars a day yelling loudly about their pet peeves...br?
I predict this will be a bad thing all round
Growth of bacteria deep within the earth's crust is well known, as is growth of bacteria near the boiling point of water>br>
HOwever, as you go deep into the earth, temperature rises, so one might ask, is there an upper temperature limit to life ?
In (I think) the '90s, Nature magazine (for profit; does a lot of sensational science) published a paper on bacteria that thrived at some very high temp; I think it was 200oC, but in any event, well over 100oC (boiling point of water at room pressure)
As you may know, all know life forms require proteins as fundamental components; if you look at proteins from the view point of organic chemistry, you find that they have a lot of things called "amide bonds", and that cleavage of said bonds often leads to inactive protein (tech note - altho not always, split proteins like lac alpha etc etc...)
Anyway, after the 1st nature paper, a few months later someone publishes a paper on the stability of the amide bond vs temp; bonds have a half life of a few minutes around 200oC
The upshot is, life as we know it probably has an upper limit for growth around 120 - 150oC; growth at higher temps is going to require something really different
seriously
Open Office just doesn't cut it for complex stuff
You can get prev versions of microsoft office cheaply on ebay
Course, your stuff is so simple you can use OO, then it doesn't really matter what you install, or how buggy it is; just don't use any feature that is a problem
the organizer/editor for bookmarks is so bad (eg, where is the export a folder of book marks to email function, where is the scan for rendundant book marks button, where is..)
when nevercooky is not in the default install
when the new addon webpage looks like a commercial for useless crap, instead of a guide to all of hte addons
when pdf handling still sucks in the default,and is, in my hands, number one cause of crashes
the browser lets other people see stuff like what type of browser I am running, and doesn't try to obscure this
new versions break old addons
.
.
.
The article has nothing to do with how faithfully the DNA is copied; it is about a well known process where a faithfull RNA copy is changed in a specific manner.
In any event, the idea of the central dogma has been dead at least since the discovery of retroviruses (early 70s) not to mention splicing (late 70s)
I don't know how well the accuracy of making RNA copies (RNA pol II transcription error rate) has been studied (with nods to cairns and starvation induced mutation in the lac system) but the error rate of DNA polymerases varies from ~ 1 in 10^4 for taq during PCR (high error rate) to ~ 1 in 10^8 in vivo in humans (recent paper from sanger on the 1,000 genome project)
I would say for humans, in vivo, that DNA polymerase has an error rate of about 1 error in every 10^8 bases copied
However, the cell expends a lot of energy on ensuring the fidelity of DNA copying
I imagine tht the fidelity of RNA copying is less good, simply cause the effects of an error are much less, so evolution has not selected for stringent copying mechanisms
As to scientists not paying attention to published papers - do you have any idea whatsoever how many papers on genetics are published every day ?
You would spend all your time just reading the titles, let alone the abstracts
is that it is not always of high quality
I think many/.ers would accept that "unemployment" numbers are, at best, correct to with a factor of 2 (people who have given up, people doing other stuff, etc)
Why is 2% unsustainable ? I suppose you will fall back on an argument based on the non accelerating rate of unemployment (which has some wierd acroynm). The trouble with such arguments is - they are just arguments; particularly in the last few years when inflation has been roughly 3% or less , even 1% unemployment would not cause accelerating inflation, particularly given the insecurity people feel about jobs.
Also, for college grads, there tends to be more specialization, so jobs are more scattered geographically; if you become unemployed, there may be a lot of "openings" but it is a big deal to move across the coutnry, esp if you have kids. I work in biotech in MA; my small (13 person) compnay laid off most of the staff; the 3 PhDs all had commutes of
I also know that china is making incredible strides in producing world class univeristys and RnD, at least in biotech, and that chinese scientists get paid a lot less then me; I read on slashdot recently that china has a project to develop an Intel level chip company, a couple of years from fruition - what will happen ot our tech sector when the chinese make cpus, and when code starts getting written with comments that are in chinese ?
Another, data driven approach that I think is better is to look at the number of gualified applicants/job.
If you are getting alot of applicants per job, then that says there is significant un employement, and there are a lot of qualified people out there.
One final thought: when I was a kid, in the 60s, it was understood by both employers and a few economists that college grads required a lot of on the job training.
This cost was borne by the employer, which , when you have long term employement, makes sense.
Now, this cost is borne more and more, in one way or another by, the employee (eg, I have seen search firms that charge the job seeker)
If firms were still doing the on the job training that they did in the'60s, they would be able to use a much larger pool of talent, and the "real" unempolyemtn rate would be higher
I havn't read but a fraction of the posts, but NOT 1 mentions the problem with healthcare costs.
Technology
Back in the '60s, Medicare etc were reasonable, cause healthcare didn't cost that much.
Now the reason technology driven costs have run amok is complex, but any discussion of cost has to start there.
It is true, the extra exspense of the free market (yes, not an oxymoron) adds 5 -15% to the cost (depending on who you listen to, that is the extra cost due to the inefficiency of having multiple companies that are not co ordinated) but that is not a whole lot compared to technology
As I understand the GOP position, it is to let poor people suffer, give the rich what they want, and punt.
As I understand the Dem position, it is to share the pain, and punt
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/images/kepler10_1.html Has gotta be the NASA version of photoshop On the other hand, for all the gazillions of dollars going into this project, they seem to have outsourced web design and layout to some undergrads, so maybe the same people did the image
without some idea of the error in the measurments, hard to tell what a change of x deg F means
People like the articles' author seem to forget that "science" covers a lot of territory, and it is done by scientists - who are humans, with all the flaws and variation and abilities of humans. If you look at the diverse array of activities and people who do science, it is hard to believe that any single "theory" will accomodate all that
Quote " especially since I got a bonus this year-end that is burning a hole in my pocket. "
We got 10 -20% unemployment, depending on what numbers you believe, which has been getting worse every month since O got elected; we got deficits, we got a technology competiton we are loosing with Asia,,,and you want to buy a smart phone
how about you take the bonus and figure out how to get Chinese to spend their remimbi on stupid gadgets made in america - at least someone will have a job
and don't tell me to lighten up...
since the meaning of words changes dramatically over time, perhaps the word "nigger" circa 1880 is equivalent to the word "slave" 2010
Personally, I think it is more important to teach children to understand that the past, while not even over, is different, and that (unlike the GOP, which is a cargo cult looking to restore some golden age) interpreting the past, or a text, requires judgement and skill, and that reasonable people can have differences.
I don't know about digital magazines, but most websites have boring content, poor contrast between background and text, and the webpage is not sized correctly for todays widescreen monitors.
Also, many webpages have a small amount of content lost in a sea of unrelated links, ranging from poorly placed ads to intrusive social media bookmarking toolbars to lists of other columns/blogs
I would say the hunger for something interesting to read is as great as ever, the quality and
layout
are not very good
To take an example, the New York Times has crisp, readable type, in a layout that is easy for the user; this took only, say, 200 years to figure out, so give slate a break
If you are outside the field, there is no way that you can describe in a few pages (the limit for most journals, esp prestigious ones) enough detail to let some one actually duplicate your experiment (assuming it can be duplicated - not everyone can afford to build a hubble, or a fermilab or a 500 Mhz NMR; or that you can gain access to and maintain specialiez cell lines or transgenic mice))
If you are in the field it is also silly; if you really need all the nitty gritty details, you call or email the authors and say, hey, these points here, what exactly do you mean...
this idea that you should describe enough detail to allow someone else to reproduce your work is one of those comforting hoary myths from 18th century england...Dobzhanski says somewhere that when he started in genetics, he could claim to have at least looked at every single paper ever published in the field, but that even a few years later, this was impossible...
People tend to forget that science is done by scientists, who vary in quality, and have up and down weeks and years....
(even T Woods or M Jordan or R Stallmann has a bad day)
as for the ionnidis article, I would be very surprised if more then 2 or 3 slashdotters know enough statistics to comment; I do know that I have looked at the article, and it is incomprehensible; further the article has been severly criticised by other statisticians (forgive the spelling)
There is empirical data to suggest that the problem is that most science is just bad or worthless; since it is worthless, no one bothers to check if it is right or wrong, so it doesn't matter if you can't reproduce it.
The data is citation counts; something like half of all papers are cited zero or one times - that means that a for a substantial fraction of the published science, no one bothers to follow up.
this is data from the ISI, which publishes the science citation index, a very valuable tool for anyone doing science.
there are 3 independent claims, 1, 10, and 18
1 is below
It is a bit hard to follow, but claim language is the precise definition of what the patent covers; if you have something that omits only one of the items below, then you are not infringing Given the many, many steps in the claim 1, I don't see it having much value - for instance, the claim language says that there will be guidelines for IP counsel; if you did everything exactly as the IBM patent said, but omitted this step, you would not be infringing. 1. A computerized system for an intellectual property (IP) framework, including:a strategic planning computer module for formulating business strategies for creating and managing inventions and IP rights, said strategic planning module including at least one electronic database having data for formulating said business strategies;an invent computer module for managing creation of said inventions based on said business strategies;an IP creation computer module for determining value of said inventions and creating an IP portfolio, said creating of said IP portfolio including creating said IP rights based on said determining of said value and said business strategies;an IP administration computer module for managing said IP rights based on said business strategies including extension, maintenance and retirement of said IP rights, measuring performance of said business strategies, creating and modifying budgets, and setting guidelines for IP counsel;a defend computer module for defending against infringements and invalidations of said IP rights based on said business strategies and monitoring market and competitor actions to develop risk management plans;an influence computer module including a standards influencing unit, a legal and regulatory influencing unit, and a policy influencing unit; anda capitalize computer module for identifying potential licensees and potential assignees of said IP rights, and managing licensing negotiations, cross-licensing negotiations, and assignment negotiations based on said business strategies,said business strategies provided by said strategic planning computer module being input into at least one of said invent computer module, said IP creation computer module, said IP administration computer module, said defend computer module, said influence computer module, and said capitalize computer module,said inventions provided by said invent computer module being input into said IP creation computer module, andsaid IP rights provided by said IP creation computer module being input into at least one of said IP administration computer module, said defend computer module, said influence computer module, and said capitalize computer module.
original ball: 25 Watt Light bulbs
Now: Luxeon Rebel LEDs
It is the "luxeon rebel" part that really bothers me , indicative of the overwhelming pressure to put advertising everywhere at all times
Membrane - very thin sheet or plate ..driven through a nanopore by an electric field. This results in a drop of the current across the pore.
From this, information on molecular properties such as length, composition can be extracted.
With DNA, it may be possilbe to get seq data Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art detection based on
ionic current blockade or fluorescence spectroscopy seems to lack the spatial and temporal resolution necessary to
obtain structural information at the single base level.
An alternative method based on tunneling perpendicular to the DNA backbone has been proposed to alleviate these limitations.
Due to its quantum mechanical origin, the tunneling current
decays rapidly with distance leading to enhanced spatial
resolution and better molecular specificity (ability to tell which base is moving thru the pore)
Pore - a small hole in the sheet
current - ions (atoms such as sodium or chloride) per second; in a salt solution, current is carried between the electrodes (usually Platinum wire, or graphite) thru the liquid by ions; these ions have a size of roughly 1 angstrom, so they are, compared to electrons, really big.
when we measure the current, we are simply measuring the number of ions/second going thru the pore; if the pore has ~ the size of a DNA moleucle, then it seems obvious tht when the DNA fills the pore; fewer ions can go thru, so the current will drop
As the authors state (editied)
In a typical nanopore experiment, biological molecules are
not entirely correct; the short strands can be up to 100 bases long (although caruthers has just published new chemistry for longer stuff) but you can make lots of them, so assembling (done in e coli, not yeast) something that is upto a few thousand bp long is pretty standard
however, assembling a mammalian genome is way beyond curren technology, for lots of reasons (you have to get the DNA into the cell, packaged into chromatin, etc)
You have some data to back this up ?
You have some real data to back this up, like some detailed comparison of 40 problems, with 20 solved by prize method and 20 solved by some other method ?
I don't know if prizes are good or not; I know that argument by anecdote (x prize foundation....) is not a good substitute for thinking
There is also a difference between a "solution" and a "solution" - it is easy to get something to work once for the prize committee; a lot harder to make it work many times, at a reasonable cost.
As a liberal, I find complaints about healthcare hypocritical, without similar complaints about no child left behind and the patriot act
NCLB is particularly odious to any traditionalist, as primary education has long been the purview of the states
Beyond that, there is something narrow minded and picky about the objections; how on earth can you actually run a country if every single thing has to be spelled out ?
You recall that seen in a few good men, wiht tom cruise and j nicholson, where cruise asks about regs and the mess hall ?
George Bush said if your spouse is not a citizen, he could break into yoiur house, steal your kids, send them to a foreign prision to be torturted and you object to.....a health car bill ?
That doesn't mean the bill is good; it just means that picking on obamacare, and not NCLB or Patriot is hypocritical
anyone who actually works in industry knows that already, today, rapid prototyping is having an incredible, astonishing role in reducing lead times and costs I was just on a project with a plastic widget that would have taken 3 weeks and 100s of dollars to machine; our partner made a prototype in 3 days (1 day to turn the rough drawing into a Solidworks drawing for our approval, two days to ge that into a tool path, make the part, and get if over to us); we evaluated it, suggested some changes (one hole turned out to be off by a few mm ) got another one two days later,... we could do 4 cycles of refinement in 3 weeks, and most of that time was because I didn't get around to testing the part, not build time We now have a beta to take to customers; we could do a rapid molding (protomold - check them out, I'm a customer; you get good injection molded parts about 3 grand for the mold and a buck or two per part) but it was easier to 3D print 100 parts precision in any system, whether it be 3D printing, CNC maching, requires that something move with a precision commensurate with the precision of hte finished part, eg if you need a hole on your car windsheild wiper nozzle that is 0.1 +- 0.01 mm, then something needs to move with resolution and accuracy of ~ 0.001 mm if you do this mechanically, with stepper motors and linear slides, it is still $$, esp in 5axis of movement. There ae cheap steppers, and gear belt (rubber belts with teeth) but those are sill $$ unless you get heal volume (the miracle of an HP printer is not that it does things with near micron precision, but that it does micron precision for a few bucks - that takes a lot of design and vol) If you do this with some sort of light feed back system (like STM heads) still a lot of money
most of the other objections on this thread show a lack of reasonable extrapolation, eg the complaints about materials - when HP or Epson thinks they are going to sell 100 million 3D printers a year, cause kids are using them for school projects, or people use them to make models, the materials will become available For instance, if you now plastic, you know that additives, like glass fibers, can impart a lot of stiffness; so you could imagine a 1,000 dollar 3D printer with 3 "inktanks" one with standard polyolefin like material, and one with stiffener, and one with hardener; you could drill and tap the hardened spots post build
Or, you could have two machines each 1,000 bucks - a 3D printer and a 4 or 5 axis CNC jobber
or you could have std metal parts (star nuts) that get embedded inthe plastic and allow for subsequent attachment of metals (eg, you have a simple 3D arm that puts a metal nut, with flanges for grip, into the part as it is built; you can use the metal nut to attach stuff on the built part
As a professional (PhD molecular biology) scientist, I think the starting point is this:
If true, this is the biggest discovery in biology since watson crick, because it really redefines fundamentals of chemistry for life.
This is different from life growing under what seems to us harsh conditions (very acid [pH 1], high temp(boiling water)) etc
Replacing phosphorus with Arsenic is really fundamental, because phosphorus is found in so many different molecules in the cell: in DNA, RNA, tRNA, ATP, phospho lipids, glycolytic intermediates, building blocks for isoprenoid compounds, etc etc; thus you really have to change a lot of very very basic things As the saying goes, extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence.
The idea that the web will not be under gov't or corp control is silly, because the web is 50% hardware - billions of dollars of fiber optic and cisco routers and servers, and someone
has to pay for that stuff
and he who pays, rules. Seriously, if yo have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in fiber optic cable, are you going to do anything that in any way interferes with your ability to make as much as possible ?
given the avg intelligence level of corp c suite excecs, that means many companies will try really stupid and obnoxious things, so even if web control is bad, alot of companies will try it
You really think a dis organized bunch of stallmanites can stand against Verizon ?
look at wall street and TARP; despite a national outcry that forced congress to vote down TARP I, they still got it passed, with no controls on wall street; the money boys got a trillion dollar gift to wall street, opposed by the vast majority of americans, thru congress. YOu think a bunch of stallmanites are going to have better success against the companies taht want web control ?
And all of you who put your faith in Obama: go and read the N Y Times story about excelon's nuclear waste dump; short story, excelon wanted to store nuclear wastge in a poor neighborhood that Obama represented early in his career; the people of this town turned to now U S Senator Obama, who promised them he would do all he could to stop this waste site. Obama went back to DC, cut a deal behind closed doors to allow the waste site, then denied he had cut a deal.
This shows a profound lack of understanding of how large corporations try to control markets.
The first thing you have to understand is that almost all large companies strive as hard as they can to remove the market from consideration - this is called "marketing" (as with most corp speak, it is newspeak, the opposite of what is intended). The goal of marketing is to make you buy stuff on silly things, like the label, rather then on what you need or what is best cost/price/function.
The second thing is that "the market" is all powerful and can fight marketing; rather it is a continual struggle; the maturity of hte market and the mumber of dominant players has a role.
IT is still possible for a faceook to spring up, but the web is so young - not even ateenager.
as the web matures and barriers to entrance become higher, power will shift away from us.
For instance, look at search engines: from what I understand, to start a new search enigne would require 10s, if not 100s of millions of dollars up front, for servers etc etc.
given that, people will only invest money in search engines that make money; user desires are secondary. look at google: it does a really crappy job as a search engine (think about what you want out of a search engine, then compare to what you get; google gets a C- at best) and part of the reason it is crappy is because it exists to sell ads, rather then help
us
I know the slashdot crowd has this belief that openess and data are a good idea, but will that crowd be willing to change their mind if this turns out to be a bad idea ? What will happen with this flood of data ?
well, very few people will actually go thru it; those who do are highly motivated - either paid searchers, hired, by say the brit equivalent of the Koch brothers, or cranks, or whatever
What ever they find, most of it will be unkown unless published by the media
so , in the end, you don't have this utopian vision of the citizenry rising up to the task of rooting out fraud and abuse; you have people like the republicans who claimed Obama was spending 200 million dollars a day yelling loudly about their pet peeves...br? I predict this will be a bad thing all round
Growth of bacteria deep within the earth's crust is well known, as is growth of bacteria near the boiling point of water>br> HOwever, as you go deep into the earth, temperature rises, so one might ask, is there an upper temperature limit to life ?
In (I think) the '90s, Nature magazine (for profit; does a lot of sensational science) published a paper on bacteria that thrived at some very high temp; I think it was 200oC, but in any event, well over 100oC (boiling point of water at room pressure)
As you may know, all know life forms require proteins as fundamental components; if you look at proteins from the view point of organic chemistry, you find that they have a lot of things called "amide bonds", and that cleavage of said bonds often leads to inactive protein (tech note - altho not always, split proteins like lac alpha etc etc...)
Anyway, after the 1st nature paper, a few months later someone publishes a paper on the stability of the amide bond vs temp; bonds have a half life of a few minutes around 200oC
The upshot is, life as we know it probably has an upper limit for growth around 120 - 150oC; growth at higher temps is going to require something really different
seriously Open Office just doesn't cut it for complex stuff You can get prev versions of microsoft office cheaply on ebay Course, your stuff is so simple you can use OO, then it doesn't really matter what you install, or how buggy it is; just don't use any feature that is a problem
the organizer/editor for bookmarks is so bad (eg, where is the export a folder of book marks to email function, where is the scan for rendundant book marks button, where is..)
when nevercooky is not in the default install
when the new addon webpage looks like a commercial for useless crap, instead of a guide to all of hte addons
when pdf handling still sucks in the default,and is, in my hands, number one cause of crashes
the browser lets other people see stuff like what type of browser I am running, and doesn't try to obscure this
new versions break old addons . . .
The article has nothing to do with how faithfully the DNA is copied; it is about a well known process where a faithfull RNA copy is changed in a specific manner. In any event, the idea of the central dogma has been dead at least since the discovery of retroviruses (early 70s) not to mention splicing (late 70s) I don't know how well the accuracy of making RNA copies (RNA pol II transcription error rate) has been studied (with nods to cairns and starvation induced mutation in the lac system) but the error rate of DNA polymerases varies from ~ 1 in 10^4 for taq during PCR (high error rate) to ~ 1 in 10^8 in vivo in humans (recent paper from sanger on the 1,000 genome project) I would say for humans, in vivo, that DNA polymerase has an error rate of about 1 error in every 10^8 bases copied However, the cell expends a lot of energy on ensuring the fidelity of DNA copying I imagine tht the fidelity of RNA copying is less good, simply cause the effects of an error are much less, so evolution has not selected for stringent copying mechanisms As to scientists not paying attention to published papers - do you have any idea whatsoever how many papers on genetics are published every day ? You would spend all your time just reading the titles, let alone the abstracts
is that it is not always of high quality /.ers would accept that "unemployment" numbers are, at best, correct to with a factor of 2 (people who have given up, people doing other stuff, etc)
I think many
Why is 2% unsustainable ? I suppose you will fall back on an argument based on the non accelerating rate of unemployment (which has some wierd acroynm). The trouble with such arguments is - they are just arguments; particularly in the last few years when inflation has been roughly 3% or less , even 1% unemployment would not cause accelerating inflation, particularly given the insecurity people feel about jobs.
Also, for college grads, there tends to be more specialization, so jobs are more scattered geographically; if you become unemployed, there may be a lot of "openings" but it is a big deal to move across the coutnry, esp if you have kids. I work in biotech in MA; my small (13 person) compnay laid off most of the staff; the 3 PhDs all had commutes of I also know that china is making incredible strides in producing world class univeristys and RnD, at least in biotech, and that chinese scientists get paid a lot less then me; I read on slashdot recently that china has a project to develop an Intel level chip company, a couple of years from fruition - what will happen ot our tech sector when the chinese make cpus, and when code starts getting written with comments that are in chinese ?
Another, data driven approach that I think is better is to look at the number of gualified applicants/job. If you are getting alot of applicants per job, then that says there is significant un employement, and there are a lot of qualified people out there.
One final thought: when I was a kid, in the 60s, it was understood by both employers and a few economists that college grads required a lot of on the job training. This cost was borne by the employer, which , when you have long term employement, makes sense. Now, this cost is borne more and more, in one way or another by, the employee (eg, I have seen search firms that charge the job seeker) If firms were still doing the on the job training that they did in the'60s, they would be able to use a much larger pool of talent, and the "real" unempolyemtn rate would be higher
I havn't read but a fraction of the posts, but NOT 1 mentions the problem with healthcare costs.
Technology
Back in the '60s, Medicare etc were reasonable, cause healthcare didn't cost that much.
Now the reason technology driven costs have run amok is complex, but any discussion of cost has to start there.
It is true, the extra exspense of the free market (yes, not an oxymoron) adds 5 -15% to the cost (depending on who you listen to, that is the extra cost due to the inefficiency of having multiple companies that are not co ordinated) but that is not a whole lot compared to technology
As I understand the GOP position, it is to let poor people suffer, give the rich what they want, and punt.
As I understand the Dem position, it is to share the pain, and punt