they give the size of the proton in two or three diff units, and the diff in two or three units, but never have a simple explanation,old x femtometers, new y femtometers
stupid mba journalists who don't know science
you can download nist time, which will sync your computer to within a few msec of the NIST clock.
when you do this, you will see that your pc is often off by hundreds of msecs
the accuracy of nist time is limited by transmission errors across the web - how do they deal with this
Example 1: among scientists, darwinian evolution is close to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the socalled "competitors" such as intelligent design, are, in the oft quoted words of planck, so bad they aren't even wrong
Yet many of hte public don't believe in evolution.
Clearly, scientists suck at communication
I don't think MS profits have anything whatsoever to do with gates
they have to do with the fact that MS finally got an OS that works in windows2000 SP3 and XPSP2 and later, and an office suite that works in office 2000
I was happy as a clam with my 2001 HP laptop running windows2000 and office 2000; I replaced it in 2009 because the HARDWARE broke - i would still be running that OS/office if my laptop hadn't busted a screen
I'm a bit of retrogrouch (def below) but I havn't found that vista/win07/office 07 do anything whatsoever that i want.
wait, thats not true: In office 2007, if you do a graph in excel with a log axis, you can have set the axis endoints to somethinhg other then a multiple of 10, eg you can scale an axis from 3 to 300, which is great for certain data
retrgrouch: in bicycles, people who long for the old days (pre 1980s) when bikes were simple
Ref
Urinary Metabolic Phenotyping Differentiates Children with Autism from Their Unaffected Siblings and Age-Matched Controls
Ivan K. S. Yap, Manya Angley, Kirill A. Veselkov, Elaine Holmes, John C. Lindon and Jeremy K. Nicholson
J. Proteome Res., 2010, 9 (6), pp 2996-3004
Publication Date (Web): March 25, 2010 (Article)
DOI: 10.1021/pr901188e
this article is behind a paywall, but if you have access to Amer Chem Soc, you can go to figure one of the paper, and you will see that the signal to noise is pretty low (remember,when doing statistics on this sort o data, you have a lot of variables - they are looking at hundreds , if not thousands of different chemcicals, so the possibility that soem are elevated is high)
like most gee whiz biology stuff on/., this is a very, very, very prelimminary study - something like 80% + of studies like this don't get replicated in larger groups
say in 15 years, no more personal cars
that would really do it for the enviroment; all this making cars green stuff is hypocritical; even when the are zero tailpipe emission (aka just as bad but you can fool yourself cause the emission is somewhere else) cars foster a lifestyle that is bad, bad, bad.
I say, ban them altogether; cars are like heroin - just no reason to have em around
here in the US "there are a lot of studies" (ie, I'm to lazy to find them) showing that rude/arrogant behaviour by docs hurts patientns - docs often refuse to wash their hands, take advice on handwahsing, etc etc
FF is lagging behind
Gee, who would've thunk, each rev is less usable then the last, tht FF is falling behind.
I like so many others, have tried, again and again, politely and impolitely, to get FF to focus on so many problems...
Like the bookmarks editor...just hopeless
Like the loss of control of privacy functions....
Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website ? If open source means anything, doesn't it mean you can get the previous releases, anytime you want ?
Failure to give add on developers a stable platform, and failure to give users a way to isolate bad addons
One of the constants of the PC era is that MS always wins, cause they can afford to ride out upstarts; however, the upstarts never survive a mistake. From quattro pro to netscape to FF, one bad release, and your toast, and MS is their to pick up the pieces
Remember the early days of USB and firewire ?
One of the "benefits" was that you could daisy chain > 100 devices to a single USB hub
About as realistic and usable as 2,000 fonts.
I mean , really, if you don't see what you want in the 1st 500......
many years ago, in the ages of DOS 4.0 and so forth, we had a hewlett packard laser jet, which we thought pretty slick, that connected with a huge fat parallel port cable.
One day, I unplug the printer and hook it up to another PC, which, children, in those far off days was quite an adventure in drivers (this was before you could download drivers off the web.....almost pre historic)
While, I send some print jobs, say job1, job2.... to the printer, some of which print and some of which vanish, but, eventually, I get all the printouts I need and hook the laserjet back to its orignal computer.
A month or two later, printjob2 popped out of the printer. snce the software for this was not installed on the pc the printer was hooked up tow, the job must have sat in the printer all that time (this is long before any "wireless" was available - it would be 2 or 3 years later that the marvel of 802.11A came along)
It is true - 1st saw this about 8 years ago - that color copiers put a pattern of yellow dots on every sheet; supposedly, the pattern is tied to the serial number of the machine.
You can see the dots, at least for some machines, with the naked eye, if you look really carefully and know what to look for.
and this is just what we know
http://www.pcworld.com/article/118664/government_uses_color_laser_printer_technology_to_track_documents.html
most of the biotech stories here on/. are academic demo projects - they got it to work, and maybe, one day, it might lead to something, but at the moment the probabilit that an virus based system of any sort is going to split water seems..ludicrous.
And most of hte biotech stuff on/. is like that, like all the lab on a chip diagnose you physiology from a drop of blood stuff, all the nanobots go into your bloodstream and heal you stuff, all the gene therapy/RNAi/antisense stuff, all the stem cell stuff...all of this stuff is years and years away from doing any good (except in the case of RNAi, which may actually help a small number of people soon)
You want real cutting edge progress in biotech....
look at artificial eyes and other organs
DNA sequencing; there was a paper in science magazine last year about how, ifyou had a mix of DNA from 10,000 random people, and DNA from a suspect, you could tell if the suspects DNA was in teh mix
we need the why your antispam won't work list
on
iPad Progress Report
·
· Score: 1
some guy has ths great checklist of reasons your antispam idea won't work
we need something like that for first looks at apple hardware
Here are reasons why your brand new, expensive apple hardware sucks
One or more may apply
1) Its exspensive
2) the warranty sucks
3) the battery, powercable, screen, keyboard or other hardware is cleary defective, as evidenced by a large number of failures,and apple won't honor warrantys, and replacing it is a major pain in the ass, and costly if done thru apple
4) Getting your new toy to work with prev generations of apple software is hard
5) I/O has major glitches, including exspensive and spotty wireless web connection, touch screens that don't work
Don't complain; just like those fools who buy a new MS OS before SP2, ou are an early adopter guinea pig for the rest of us.
I thank you for your service
PS: as a mac hater, I think you are all whackjobs; you buy this overpriced crap that doesn't do anything so you think you are cool. My laptop cost 425 bucks; I could buy two or three for the cost of a mac (and specs don't matter - I only do simple stuff, so it doesn't matter how much ram or hd space or whatever i have)
but thats just me
Instead of showing off with your mac crap, why don't you buy something cheap, and send the money to haiti or save the children. yo can put a little sticker on your cheap cell phone, I got this cheap cell phone instead of an iphone so 50 kids could have dinner........
the author states that prius owners who get in accelerator accidents are old.
But, since he doesn't tell us what the avg age of a prius owner is, this is meaningless
in my town, newton MA, the avg age of prius owners looks to be >40, and possibly >50
so, that would mean his main conclusion is simply wrong
For a master race that controls the world, we sure get a lot a crap.
I mean, everytime i hear that someone wants to convert, I say, look we have 2,000 years of history that runs the gamut from bad to awfull to genocide, hwy on earth would you wnat to convert - surely you don't want to do that to your children ?
true story: in the 60's my parents are thinging of emigrating to israel, so they talk to the consulate, and the guy says you know, we have the law of return, the moment you step foot on israeli soil, you are a citizen.
MY dad says, what if nonjews claim they are jews ?
the israeli consular officer looks at him, and says, yeah, right....
I actually know a lot about DNA, and I will assert that once you know that a particular piece of DNA needs to be tested for, the way to test is "obvious" and therefore, non patentable.
For instance, lets say a researcher discovers that some new gene - newgeneX - occurs in several different forms (think eye color) among humans, and that one of these forms is associated with a very high risk of heart attack (think apo4e)
once you know this, tests, such as PCR followed by sequencing (454, ion torrent, pacific, SoLid) are "obvious"
so really
a few days ago this was a top story on yahoo home page, with another picture, if you right clicked on the photo on th yahoo site, the info strongly suggested the photo was stock of someplace else, aka a lie
this url takes you to the real article http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08956.html
As a scientist who works in biotech, I am amazed at how credulous slashdot is about biotech stuff; i guess it is because most/.s are not biologists, so they don't understand how far from a treatment this sort of thing is;
This is great science, and an important step forward, but it is a long, long way from an FDA approved treatment.
its the screen
screns are way way behind paper in usability
just to mention one huge problem: most writing is portrait (short end of page up) and most screens are landscape.
screens are way slow; you can flip thru a dozen pages and find stuff, and compare two or 3 pages way easier on paper
you can bring paper with you to a mtg, or lunch or whatever
its easy to doodle on paper, if that helps you focus your thoughts
do you trust obama and the dems ?
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As i understand it, the bill has 3 major parts
1) a whole bunch of programs to evaluate new ideas; basically grants to researchers of one sort or another
2) regulations to rein in the bad behaviour of insurance companies
3) provide insurance to 30 million people who now lack it
lets leave 1 aside and look at 2 and 3
Do you really think that this bill will stop the insurance companies ? For instance, there is a section (109 in HR3967) that bans lifetime benefit caps. and you can read it yourself, and it looks pretty straightforward. I don't know how the insurance companies will get around it, but htey have, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars to buy armies of lawyers and lobbyiest and politicians to overturn this over the next 5-10 years
So my conclusion is tthat at best, (2) will have some moderate effect over a few years
As to 3 - I think what will happen, based on the MA model(I live in MA) is that yes, there will be a lot of people who will get insurance, but we won't have the money to pay for it. So, to save money, we will make this new insurance cheap and not very good (eg, low payments to doctors and hospitals, so only really bad hospitals will take people on this plan), so what will wind up happening is that we will create a permanent underclasss of people who have "insurance' that doesn't really work - it is like poor people who get charged with a capital felony crime; we pretend to provide lawyers, but dont' do anything really effective
If you look at the down side, it is Huge.
Obama is instituting a new national policy - health care, a basic fundamental right ina civilized society, is providd by for profit companies, and the FED. Govt requires you to pay these for profit compnies
its horrible
Another way to look at this is Obama's track record, say with the wall street bail out, where he made sure bankers got their million dollar bonuses - with tax dollars that came from your pocket.
how on earth could anyone trust this guy with a track record like that ??
I think this http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/Campbell-Smith%20Mead%20Autism%20Decision.pdf
is the right one, the court of claims website has several
http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/5026/
The principal evidence against the parents are several large studies (> 100,000 children) where they compared autism in groups with and witout mercury vaccines (thimerosol). There was no difference.
further, the scandinavians have looked at autism rates before and after useage of thimerosol; no difference.
This is probably the best data we can hope to get showing htat mercury in vaccines doesn't cause autims.
to get around this, the parents argued that thimerosol causes a special, rare kind of autism (regressive autism), and that studies on large numbers of children are meaningless because they don't have the statistical power to see a change in a small percent of the population (if you have 100,000 kids with thimerosol, and 100K without, and the general autism rate is 1% and the regressive autism rate is 0.1%, you won't have statistically sign numbers for the rare form of the disiease.
the master dismissed this argument concluding that there was no evidence for a distinct disease called regressive autism.
there was a lot of stuff about how mercury enters the brain and what it does; sort of inconclusive; the parents didn't really have any good data to support their theorys, eg although distinct, measurable changes occcur ain humans and animals at levels of mercury much higher then what childrne are exposed to, the parents argued that their children have a genetic makeup that makes them hypersensitive to mercury; the problem with this is that they dind't have any data to support this theory, which is perfectly plausible; the parents brought up wilson's disease, which is hypersensitivity to copper.
aused the childs autism; he said that there was no plausible theory or data
after reading the pdf
are condemmed to repeat it
sometime after he left office, henry kissinger noted that all his efforts to out do the soviet union by pushing new, fancy arms systems were a disaster, the soviets always managed to copy us, and sooner then we expected.
His case in point was MIRVED missles (MIRV, multiple independent re entry vehicles, instead of the missle delivering one bomb to one spot, one missle delivers several bombs to different locations)
Slashdot Mirror
they give the size of the proton in two or three diff units, and the diff in two or three units, but never have a simple explanation,old x femtometers, new y femtometers stupid mba journalists who don't know science
you can download nist time, which will sync your computer to within a few msec of the NIST clock. when you do this, you will see that your pc is often off by hundreds of msecs the accuracy of nist time is limited by transmission errors across the web - how do they deal with this
Example 1: among scientists, darwinian evolution is close to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the socalled "competitors" such as intelligent design, are, in the oft quoted words of planck, so bad they aren't even wrong Yet many of hte public don't believe in evolution. Clearly, scientists suck at communication
I don't think MS profits have anything whatsoever to do with gates they have to do with the fact that MS finally got an OS that works in windows2000 SP3 and XPSP2 and later, and an office suite that works in office 2000 I was happy as a clam with my 2001 HP laptop running windows2000 and office 2000; I replaced it in 2009 because the HARDWARE broke - i would still be running that OS/office if my laptop hadn't busted a screen I'm a bit of retrogrouch (def below) but I havn't found that vista/win07/office 07 do anything whatsoever that i want. wait, thats not true: In office 2007, if you do a graph in excel with a log axis, you can have set the axis endoints to somethinhg other then a multiple of 10, eg you can scale an axis from 3 to 300, which is great for certain data retrgrouch: in bicycles, people who long for the old days (pre 1980s) when bikes were simple
Ref Urinary Metabolic Phenotyping Differentiates Children with Autism from Their Unaffected Siblings and Age-Matched Controls Ivan K. S. Yap, Manya Angley, Kirill A. Veselkov, Elaine Holmes, John C. Lindon and Jeremy K. Nicholson J. Proteome Res., 2010, 9 (6), pp 2996-3004 Publication Date (Web): March 25, 2010 (Article) DOI: 10.1021/pr901188e this article is behind a paywall, but if you have access to Amer Chem Soc, you can go to figure one of the paper, and you will see that the signal to noise is pretty low (remember,when doing statistics on this sort o data, you have a lot of variables - they are looking at hundreds , if not thousands of different chemcicals, so the possibility that soem are elevated is high) like most gee whiz biology stuff on /., this is a very, very, very prelimminary study - something like 80% + of studies like this don't get replicated in larger groups
say in 15 years, no more personal cars that would really do it for the enviroment; all this making cars green stuff is hypocritical; even when the are zero tailpipe emission (aka just as bad but you can fool yourself cause the emission is somewhere else) cars foster a lifestyle that is bad, bad, bad. I say, ban them altogether; cars are like heroin - just no reason to have em around
here in the US "there are a lot of studies" (ie, I'm to lazy to find them) showing that rude/arrogant behaviour by docs hurts patientns - docs often refuse to wash their hands, take advice on handwahsing, etc etc
FF is lagging behind Gee, who would've thunk, each rev is less usable then the last, tht FF is falling behind. I like so many others, have tried, again and again, politely and impolitely, to get FF to focus on so many problems... Like the bookmarks editor...just hopeless Like the loss of control of privacy functions.... Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website ? If open source means anything, doesn't it mean you can get the previous releases, anytime you want ? Failure to give add on developers a stable platform, and failure to give users a way to isolate bad addons One of the constants of the PC era is that MS always wins, cause they can afford to ride out upstarts; however, the upstarts never survive a mistake. From quattro pro to netscape to FF, one bad release, and your toast, and MS is their to pick up the pieces
Remember the early days of USB and firewire ? One of the "benefits" was that you could daisy chain > 100 devices to a single USB hub About as realistic and usable as 2,000 fonts. I mean , really, if you don't see what you want in the 1st 500......
I bet there isn't a sciencetific group in the world whoose statistical methods would look great under scrutiny hindsight is always 20/20
http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/teaching_slide_design.html http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html btw, today i had to give a ppt to a fortune 500 company interested in us (small company smellign $$$$) i had one killer handdrawn figure, you could see the lightbulbs go on when people saw it
many years ago, in the ages of DOS 4.0 and so forth, we had a hewlett packard laser jet, which we thought pretty slick, that connected with a huge fat parallel port cable. One day, I unplug the printer and hook it up to another PC, which, children, in those far off days was quite an adventure in drivers (this was before you could download drivers off the web.....almost pre historic) While, I send some print jobs, say job1, job2.... to the printer, some of which print and some of which vanish, but, eventually, I get all the printouts I need and hook the laserjet back to its orignal computer. A month or two later, printjob2 popped out of the printer. snce the software for this was not installed on the pc the printer was hooked up tow, the job must have sat in the printer all that time (this is long before any "wireless" was available - it would be 2 or 3 years later that the marvel of 802.11A came along)
It is true - 1st saw this about 8 years ago - that color copiers put a pattern of yellow dots on every sheet; supposedly, the pattern is tied to the serial number of the machine. You can see the dots, at least for some machines, with the naked eye, if you look really carefully and know what to look for. and this is just what we know http://www.pcworld.com/article/118664/government_uses_color_laser_printer_technology_to_track_documents.html
most of the biotech stories here on /. are academic demo projects - they got it to work, and maybe, one day, it might lead to something, but at the moment the probabilit that an virus based system of any sort is going to split water seems..ludicrous.
And most of hte biotech stuff on /. is like that, like all the lab on a chip diagnose you physiology from a drop of blood stuff, all the nanobots go into your bloodstream and heal you stuff, all the gene therapy/RNAi/antisense stuff, all the stem cell stuff...all of this stuff is years and years away from doing any good (except in the case of RNAi, which may actually help a small number of people soon)
You want real cutting edge progress in biotech....
look at artificial eyes and other organs
DNA sequencing; there was a paper in science magazine last year about how, ifyou had a mix of DNA from 10,000 random people, and DNA from a suspect, you could tell if the suspects DNA was in teh mix
some guy has ths great checklist of reasons your antispam idea won't work we need something like that for first looks at apple hardware Here are reasons why your brand new, expensive apple hardware sucks One or more may apply 1) Its exspensive 2) the warranty sucks 3) the battery, powercable, screen, keyboard or other hardware is cleary defective, as evidenced by a large number of failures,and apple won't honor warrantys, and replacing it is a major pain in the ass, and costly if done thru apple 4) Getting your new toy to work with prev generations of apple software is hard 5) I/O has major glitches, including exspensive and spotty wireless web connection, touch screens that don't work Don't complain; just like those fools who buy a new MS OS before SP2, ou are an early adopter guinea pig for the rest of us. I thank you for your service PS: as a mac hater, I think you are all whackjobs; you buy this overpriced crap that doesn't do anything so you think you are cool. My laptop cost 425 bucks; I could buy two or three for the cost of a mac (and specs don't matter - I only do simple stuff, so it doesn't matter how much ram or hd space or whatever i have) but thats just me Instead of showing off with your mac crap, why don't you buy something cheap, and send the money to haiti or save the children. yo can put a little sticker on your cheap cell phone, I got this cheap cell phone instead of an iphone so 50 kids could have dinner... .....
the author states that prius owners who get in accelerator accidents are old. But, since he doesn't tell us what the avg age of a prius owner is, this is meaningless in my town, newton MA, the avg age of prius owners looks to be >40, and possibly >50 so, that would mean his main conclusion is simply wrong
For a master race that controls the world, we sure get a lot a crap. I mean, everytime i hear that someone wants to convert, I say, look we have 2,000 years of history that runs the gamut from bad to awfull to genocide, hwy on earth would you wnat to convert - surely you don't want to do that to your children ? true story: in the 60's my parents are thinging of emigrating to israel, so they talk to the consulate, and the guy says you know, we have the law of return, the moment you step foot on israeli soil, you are a citizen. MY dad says, what if nonjews claim they are jews ? the israeli consular officer looks at him, and says, yeah, right....
I have used QCD (quintessential media playerd) for a long time, an it works for me
I actually know a lot about DNA, and I will assert that once you know that a particular piece of DNA needs to be tested for, the way to test is "obvious" and therefore, non patentable. For instance, lets say a researcher discovers that some new gene - newgeneX - occurs in several different forms (think eye color) among humans, and that one of these forms is associated with a very high risk of heart attack (think apo4e) once you know this, tests, such as PCR followed by sequencing (454, ion torrent, pacific, SoLid) are "obvious" so really
a few days ago this was a top story on yahoo home page, with another picture, if you right clicked on the photo on th yahoo site, the info strongly suggested the photo was stock of someplace else, aka a lie
this url takes you to the real article /.s are not biologists, so they don't understand how far from a treatment this sort of thing is;
This is great science, and an important step forward, but it is a long, long way from an FDA approved treatment.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08956.html
As a scientist who works in biotech, I am amazed at how credulous slashdot is about biotech stuff; i guess it is because most
its the screen screns are way way behind paper in usability just to mention one huge problem: most writing is portrait (short end of page up) and most screens are landscape. screens are way slow; you can flip thru a dozen pages and find stuff, and compare two or 3 pages way easier on paper you can bring paper with you to a mtg, or lunch or whatever its easy to doodle on paper, if that helps you focus your thoughts
As i understand it, the bill has 3 major parts
1) a whole bunch of programs to evaluate new ideas; basically grants to researchers of one sort or another
2) regulations to rein in the bad behaviour of insurance companies
3) provide insurance to 30 million people who now lack it
lets leave 1 aside and look at 2 and 3
Do you really think that this bill will stop the insurance companies ? For instance, there is a section (109 in HR3967) that bans lifetime benefit caps. and you can read it yourself, and it looks pretty straightforward. I don't know how the insurance companies will get around it, but htey have, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars to buy armies of lawyers and lobbyiest and politicians to overturn this over the next 5-10 years
So my conclusion is tthat at best, (2) will have some moderate effect over a few years
As to 3 - I think what will happen, based on the MA model(I live in MA) is that yes, there will be a lot of people who will get insurance, but we won't have the money to pay for it. So, to save money, we will make this new insurance cheap and not very good (eg, low payments to doctors and hospitals, so only really bad hospitals will take people on this plan), so what will wind up happening is that we will create a permanent underclasss of people who have "insurance' that doesn't really work - it is like poor people who get charged with a capital felony crime; we pretend to provide lawyers, but dont' do anything really effective
If you look at the down side, it is Huge.
Obama is instituting a new national policy - health care, a basic fundamental right ina civilized society, is providd by for profit companies, and the FED. Govt requires you to pay these for profit compnies its horrible
Another way to look at this is Obama's track record, say with the wall street bail out, where he made sure bankers got their million dollar bonuses - with tax dollars that came from your pocket.
how on earth could anyone trust this guy with a track record like that ??
I think this http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/Campbell-Smith%20Mead%20Autism%20Decision.pdf is the right one, the court of claims website has several http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/5026/ The principal evidence against the parents are several large studies (> 100,000 children) where they compared autism in groups with and witout mercury vaccines (thimerosol). There was no difference. further, the scandinavians have looked at autism rates before and after useage of thimerosol; no difference. This is probably the best data we can hope to get showing htat mercury in vaccines doesn't cause autims. to get around this, the parents argued that thimerosol causes a special, rare kind of autism (regressive autism), and that studies on large numbers of children are meaningless because they don't have the statistical power to see a change in a small percent of the population (if you have 100,000 kids with thimerosol, and 100K without, and the general autism rate is 1% and the regressive autism rate is 0.1%, you won't have statistically sign numbers for the rare form of the disiease. the master dismissed this argument concluding that there was no evidence for a distinct disease called regressive autism. there was a lot of stuff about how mercury enters the brain and what it does; sort of inconclusive; the parents didn't really have any good data to support their theorys, eg although distinct, measurable changes occcur ain humans and animals at levels of mercury much higher then what childrne are exposed to, the parents argued that their children have a genetic makeup that makes them hypersensitive to mercury; the problem with this is that they dind't have any data to support this theory, which is perfectly plausible; the parents brought up wilson's disease, which is hypersensitivity to copper. aused the childs autism; he said that there was no plausible theory or data after reading the pdf
are condemmed to repeat it sometime after he left office, henry kissinger noted that all his efforts to out do the soviet union by pushing new, fancy arms systems were a disaster, the soviets always managed to copy us, and sooner then we expected. His case in point was MIRVED missles (MIRV, multiple independent re entry vehicles, instead of the missle delivering one bomb to one spot, one missle delivers several bombs to different locations)