T-mo are actually very helpful when you need to unlock the phone. I have unlocked 2 phones with them in the past couple of years. One was an old set that got replaced after contract renewal. The other one is still under contract. I asked them for the unlock code so I can switch the SIM when traveling abroad and avoid the roaming charges. They were very prompt sending me e-mail with the code and detailed instructions how to unlock the phone. Their customer service is the major reason I am still with them.
If Amtrak and CSX et al improved the track, including engaging in a program of electrification (which they should do anyway),....
Railroads!? Electrification?!!! My friend you are talking about something much worse than terrorism. You are talking socialism! Vladimir Ilich Lenin once famously said:
"Socialism is the Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country."
This will never happen in the US. Americans will rather go through 2 day full cavity search to board a plain, than be herded on an electricity powered railroad car. It was Hitler that used the railroad to commit the holocaust.
They then surveyed the traits that conferred reproductive success. After adjusting for environmental factors such as income, education and lifestyle choices such as smoking, the researchers estimated the heritability of traits by applying correlations among all relatives.
If you are studying evolution, you are not supposed to 'adjust' environmental factors. Environmental factors are driving evolution. If you eliminate them you are studying genetic drift.
Besides what evolution we are talking about. They had only 2 generation.
How about the individuals who demand our government buy price-controlled medicine from Canada to deny the organization who discovered it the fruits of their labor, and the ability to recoup their investment?
This is not exactly true. The fact is that the drug industry is making handsome profit at the prices they sell in Canada, Mexico or Europe. They easily recoup their R&D costs. Besides, R&D expenditures in the pharma industry are relatively small part of their budget. For example marketing costs are about 3 times as much (can you turn on TV and not see an add for a prescription drug?) . Even manufacturing costs are higher. The reason for this is that all the basic research as well as some of the drug development is done by universities and payed by grants from the government (NIH, DoE, DoD, NSF) and non-for-profits.
Creators and inventors see a hostile environment for profiting off their works, so they stop investing in creating and inventing.
Creators and inventors do what they do because they enjoy it. Making money is a second or third motivator. If it was the primary goal they would be in marketing selling you stuff from China that you don't need.
because aircraft can change their point to point routes only limited by rules put on their flight. To replicate that with trains would be pretty much outside the realm of feasibility.
I am not sure how feasible is this even for plains. Sure you can fly any two points, but how often you will have enough passengers for it to make sense?
Lets propose we could actually build such a network, it would most likely be a hub and spoke arrangement.
Sure, an example would be the way air travel operates - hub airports + regional lines to feed into them
This means that what is a direct route for a plane would be a minimum of two stops for a train. The reason flight is so popular is because of its preservation of time which to many is the most important resource they have.
This is the case in the US where you don't have anything remotely resembling proper high speed train network. Flight saves you time on long routes. On routes of 300-600 miles it doesn't. When you fly you need to get to the airport, which is typically outside the city, you need to show up early so you can get through security and than when you land again you need time to travel from the airport to your destination.
Trains on the other hand most often than not go to the center of the cities, and in big cities have more than one stop. You don't need to get through security, so you can be on the station couple of minutes before the train leaves. Even on longer distances (up to 1000 miles) for many people it would make more sense to take a night train and sleep than loose a day going to and from the airport.
I am not arguing to replace the air travel with trains. It just doesn't make sense to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Phoenix or Las Vegas, when from point to point a high speed train will get you as fast as a plain. On the east coast taking the train will make even more sense.
On the other hand traveling coast to coast, or to the middle of the country, air travel is the better choice.
... I found that the device did change my driving while it was installed. As I was reviewing the data that comes of it every couple of days, I would instinctively try to beat it. I would not accelerate and brake abruptly, speed, etc., which in turn lead to keeping longer distance between me and the vehicle in front and drive defensively. For the couple of months I was using it I was a safer driver. As a side effect my fuel economy was somewhat better.
I participated in a survey by an insurance company to test the feasibility of all this. They used a device connected to the OBD II port, that collected a lot more data than just the miles driven. They logged every trip for duration, distance and continuously recorded speed, acceleration and braking rates.
The device didn't have a GPS so they didn't know where I was driving. I understand in Texas some insurance companies also did trials with GPS enabled devices.
So they can apply really fine grained risk assessment, based on how you drive, where you drive what tome of the day you drive, etc. On the other hand they can use every single bit of data to jack up your rate - you don't brake smooth enough - 5% penalty, you press the pedal to the metal - 10%, you drive on the 404 - 30%, you do all this between 4 and 6pm - another 20%.
No lawyer would agree to this. This would be a obvious conflict of interest and lawyers have standards. Banks on the other hand....
TR shot themselfs in the foot with this lawsuit
on
Zotero Lawsuit Dismissed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Taking page of RIAA playbook TR sued their own clients - academics using EndNote. The silly part is that many of the citation style files the lawsuit was about are actually created by Endnote users.
To make their court case stronger they put legal language on their website that prohibited sharing of style files and reference libraries. This naturally raised questions from the endnote users, because sharing these files is essential part of using the product. The support staff on their user forums was put in an awkward position of explaining that that files can in fact be shared, while the language on their own web site was stating the opposite. Now it seems they have corrected the license statement to allow such sharing.
The idea is very clever. The technique itself has been around for quite some time, but nobody has tried to use it to reprogram cells into iPSC. The main advantage is that you eliminate introduction of viral DNA/RNA into the cells, which has been causing problems. The disadvantage is that it is significantly less efficient when compared to viral vectors. I don't think this is a problem.There is a lot of room for optimization.
There is more to this than it is published in the paper. You can use the same trick to push your newly obtained iPSC to differentiate into the cell type you need. For example introduction of MyoD can turn them into muscle cells for treatment of muscular dystrophy.
This is one beautiful example of 'non research' crap being pushed out. They didn't do a proper 'field study' with well defined and controlled questions. They took a heterogeneous collection of other peoples published results and tried to mix them together. In this type of questionnaire based studies it is extremely important how do you define the question. It is also important to ask the same question in different ways and to control for the motives and the background of the person who answers that.
For example what are they trying to say here:
A pooled, weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once â" a serious form of misconduct by any standard â" and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices.
All this depends on how they defined the questions. A narrow question "Have you fabricated data?" will result in a low number. A broad question "Have you ever done an experiment that you now think was not properly controlled?" will give a close to a 100% positive answers.
Is it surprising that if 2% of scientist falsify data 72% will now about that?
Not having done their own ground work the only think they can do is to tweak the statistics. Is anyone surprised that it didn't make it to a peer reviewed journal ??
Having said that i don't claim that scientific misconduct does not take place. Most of the research (I am talking about the academic biomedical field) is done by underpaid and overworked grad students and postdocs on tight schedules. They are under pressure to move on with their carriers and get some resemblance of normal life. Their supervisors are on tight schedules to produce results for grant reports and publications so they can get funded. Many universities (I would say most) even have goals of achieving external funding defined as dollars per square foot of lab space. If you don't look like you can bring money at the desired rate you are not hired as a PI, no matter how sound, innovative and important your work may be.
This pressure naturally makes people to take shortcuts. But all this is built into the system and there are safeguards. Poor quality research is harder to push into higher impact journals. Good data is reproduced by different groups using different methods and the predictions based on it are experimentally confirmed. So the bad stuff get's sifted out and the sound research gets incorporated into the base knowledge on which future work is built upon.
If anyone wants to reorganize the current system, they should first have a good plan on how to make it better. Preferably it will be tested on a small scale and shown to work as expected.
Most of those Bermuda/Cayman holding companies exist not to avoid taxes entirely, but rather to keep the US from double-taxing profits that have already been taxed once by Europe/Asia, which is what the US does when this offshore trick isn't used.
This is bogus argument. US has tax treaties with most of the rest of the world that prevent double taxation
It seems likely to me that if US companies can't do that any longer, many will cease to be US companies. It's not that hard to move HQ to Ireland or Canada or wherever. Then the US can become a nation of grunt workers while the real power and intellect (and taxable personal income) is abroad.
And where will they go exactly to find regulations and tax system that is more friendly to corporation than US? Canada? Really!?
EU is cracking on tax heavens too and Ireland will not enjoy it's special status much longer.
Zotero is a firefox extension that can grab reserach papers directly from the journal or library web sites. It organizes the papers in collections, has keywords (they call them tags), can automatically index the PDFs. The metadata is stored also on a remote server and you can browse through it using a web interface. You also get a Word and Openoffice plugins to insert citations in the papers you write. The plugins are a little rough around the edges, but are usable. The references formatting is very robust and comes with styles for a lot of journals.
Mendeley is stand alone application. I haven't tryed it yet,but is seems to have very similar functionality.
Massive immune system response to the gene tinkering leading to immediate death.
They are injecting short nucleic acids that block a signal on RNA (a splice site) from being recognized which causes part of it to be skipped and at the end you get a shorter protein. The nucleic acid fragments are not immunogenic, and the shorter protein does not have any new sequences to which the immune system has not developed tolerance. So this is not real concern.
Some gene gets tinkered in the wrong spot and you get cancer too.
This is a concern when developing gene therapy. In this case this is not an issue, because you are not 'tinkering' with the gene. What they target is the RNA transcript of the gene.
Go through a costly and/or miserable treatment with no effect.
Short nucleic acids are cheap to make. The treatment is likely to be an IV injection every few weeks. Compared to slowly loosing your muscles and suffocating because you no longer have strength to bread this hardly qualifies as miserable.
Even if it is possible, I don't see any EULA attached to the EndNote style files. There is no license, no copyright statement, nothing at all.
What exactly is the Zotero team violating?
Besides Zotero does not convert the '.ens' files to '.csl' or to anything else that is stored. It maps the fields on the fly when formatting the text.
Endnote is a pile of features added over time with no common design or any usability consideration. Its is not designed for operating systems with user level restrictions and it is barely aware of the existence of Internet.
The only reason EndNote has been making money is the lack of competitors in its niche market.
Yeah, what is their false positive rate?
I can get 100% "mal-intent" detection in a croud of jailing every single one of them.
How about testing in an international airport, where jet-lagged passengers with limited command of English language are going through routine border control questions?
117?! This is an overkill. I can boil them down to 3 subatomic particles - electron, proton and neutron.
Physicists, feel free to pitch in. Lets get to the bottom of these pesky diseases.
Dude, _read_ _the_ _fucking_ _article_! Their bases are not the stuff you can buy from the store. Look at the structures, they are not even going to pair with the regular bases. Their iG:iC pair uses DDA (donor, donor, acceptor) sequence of hydrogen bonds instead of ADD in the normal G:C pairs. I'll be surprised if you used similar 'alternate nucleotides' for the 'past 20 years' to 'create random mutations'.
There is a practical use for these and is not for making 'random mutations'. Having alternative to DNA and RNA is one of the prerequisites in creating synthetic organisms with different genetics and biochemistry. Imagine starting the the evolution from scratch, or creating microbes for industry that can't exchange genetic information with the rest of the living organisms on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
T-mo are actually very helpful when you need to unlock the phone. I have unlocked 2 phones with them in the past couple of years. One was an old set that got replaced after contract renewal. The other one is still under contract. I asked them for the unlock code so I can switch the SIM when traveling abroad and avoid the roaming charges. They were very prompt sending me e-mail with the code and detailed instructions how to unlock the phone. Their customer service is the major reason I am still with them.
If Amtrak and CSX et al improved the track, including engaging in a program of electrification (which they should do anyway),....
Railroads!? Electrification?!!! My friend you are talking about something much worse than terrorism. You are talking socialism! Vladimir Ilich Lenin once famously said:
"Socialism is the Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country."
This will never happen in the US. Americans will rather go through 2 day full cavity search to board a plain, than be herded on an electricity powered railroad car. It was Hitler that used the railroad to commit the holocaust.
From the article:
They then surveyed the traits that conferred reproductive success. After adjusting for environmental factors such as income, education and lifestyle choices such as smoking, the researchers estimated the heritability of traits by applying correlations among all relatives.
If you are studying evolution, you are not supposed to 'adjust' environmental factors. Environmental factors are driving evolution. If you eliminate them you are studying genetic drift.
Besides what evolution we are talking about. They had only 2 generation.
This is not exactly true. The fact is that the drug industry is making handsome profit at the prices they sell in Canada, Mexico or Europe. They easily recoup their R&D costs. Besides, R&D expenditures in the pharma industry are relatively small part of their budget. For example marketing costs are about 3 times as much (can you turn on TV and not see an add for a prescription drug?) . Even manufacturing costs are higher. The reason for this is that all the basic research as well as some of the drug development is done by universities and payed by grants from the government (NIH, DoE, DoD, NSF) and non-for-profits. Creators and inventors see a hostile environment for profiting off their works, so they stop investing in creating and inventing.
Creators and inventors do what they do because they enjoy it. Making money is a second or third motivator. If it was the primary goal they would be in marketing selling you stuff from China that you don't need.
because aircraft can change their point to point routes only limited by rules put on their flight. To replicate that with trains would be pretty much outside the realm of feasibility.
I am not sure how feasible is this even for plains. Sure you can fly any two points, but how often you will have enough passengers for it to make sense?
Lets propose we could actually build such a network, it would most likely be a hub and spoke arrangement.
Sure, an example would be the way air travel operates - hub airports + regional lines to feed into them
This means that what is a direct route for a plane would be a minimum of two stops for a train. The reason flight is so popular is because of its preservation of time which to many is the most important resource they have.
This is the case in the US where you don't have anything remotely resembling proper high speed train network. Flight saves you time on long routes. On routes of 300-600 miles it doesn't. When you fly you need to get to the airport, which is typically outside the city, you need to show up early so you can get through security and than when you land again you need time to travel from the airport to your destination.
Trains on the other hand most often than not go to the center of the cities, and in big cities have more than one stop. You don't need to get through security, so you can be on the station couple of minutes before the train leaves. Even on longer distances (up to 1000 miles) for many people it would make more sense to take a night train and sleep than loose a day going to and from the airport.
I am not arguing to replace the air travel with trains. It just doesn't make sense to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Phoenix or Las Vegas, when from point to point a high speed train will get you as fast as a plain. On the east coast taking the train will make even more sense.
On the other hand traveling coast to coast, or to the middle of the country, air travel is the better choice.
Where can I collect my reward?
... I found that the device did change my driving while it was installed. As I was reviewing the data that comes of it every couple of days, I would instinctively try to beat it. I would not accelerate and brake abruptly, speed, etc., which in turn lead to keeping longer distance between me and the vehicle in front and drive defensively. For the couple of months I was using it I was a safer driver. As a side effect my fuel economy was somewhat better.
It is not just how much you drive.
I participated in a survey by an insurance company to test the feasibility of all this. They used a device connected to the OBD II port, that collected a lot more data than just the miles driven. They logged every trip for duration, distance and continuously recorded speed, acceleration and braking rates.
The device didn't have a GPS so they didn't know where I was driving. I understand in Texas some insurance companies also did trials with GPS enabled devices.
So they can apply really fine grained risk assessment, based on how you drive, where you drive what tome of the day you drive, etc. On the other hand they can use every single bit of data to jack up your rate - you don't brake smooth enough - 5% penalty, you press the pedal to the metal - 10%, you drive on the 404 - 30%, you do all this between 4 and 6pm - another 20%.
No lawyer would agree to this. This would be a obvious conflict of interest and lawyers have standards. Banks on the other hand ....
To make their court case stronger they put legal language on their website that prohibited sharing of style files and reference libraries. This naturally raised questions from the endnote users, because sharing these files is essential part of using the product. The support staff on their user forums was put in an awkward position of explaining that that files can in fact be shared, while the language on their own web site was stating the opposite. Now it seems they have corrected the license statement to allow such sharing.
Nice PR, TR;)
There is more to this than it is published in the paper. You can use the same trick to push your newly obtained iPSC to differentiate into the cell type you need. For example introduction of MyoD can turn them into muscle cells for treatment of muscular dystrophy.
For example what are they trying to say here:
A pooled, weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once â" a serious form of misconduct by any standard â" and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices.
All this depends on how they defined the questions. A narrow question "Have you fabricated data?" will result in a low number. A broad question "Have you ever done an experiment that you now think was not properly controlled?" will give a close to a 100% positive answers.
Is it surprising that if 2% of scientist falsify data 72% will now about that?
Not having done their own ground work the only think they can do is to tweak the statistics. Is anyone surprised that it didn't make it to a peer reviewed journal ??
Having said that i don't claim that scientific misconduct does not take place. Most of the research (I am talking about the academic biomedical field) is done by underpaid and overworked grad students and postdocs on tight schedules. They are under pressure to move on with their carriers and get some resemblance of normal life. Their supervisors are on tight schedules to produce results for grant reports and publications so they can get funded. Many universities (I would say most) even have goals of achieving external funding defined as dollars per square foot of lab space. If you don't look like you can bring money at the desired rate you are not hired as a PI, no matter how sound, innovative and important your work may be.
This pressure naturally makes people to take shortcuts. But all this is built into the system and there are safeguards. Poor quality research is harder to push into higher impact journals. Good data is reproduced by different groups using different methods and the predictions based on it are experimentally confirmed. So the bad stuff get's sifted out and the sound research gets incorporated into the base knowledge on which future work is built upon.
If anyone wants to reorganize the current system, they should first have a good plan on how to make it better. Preferably it will be tested on a small scale and shown to work as expected.
Damn! Those rural Mexico biotech labs are really sloppy. I bet the authorities have not been paying attention to their safety practices.
Most of those Bermuda/Cayman holding companies exist not to avoid taxes entirely, but rather to keep the US from double-taxing profits that have already been taxed once by Europe/Asia, which is what the US does when this offshore trick isn't used.
This is bogus argument. US has tax treaties with most of the rest of the world that prevent double taxation
It seems likely to me that if US companies can't do that any longer, many will cease to be US companies. It's not that hard to move HQ to Ireland or Canada or wherever. Then the US can become a nation of grunt workers while the real power and intellect (and taxable personal income) is abroad.
And where will they go exactly to find regulations and tax system that is more friendly to corporation than US? Canada? Really!?
EU is cracking on tax heavens too and Ireland will not enjoy it's special status much longer.
Zotero is a firefox extension that can grab reserach papers directly from the journal or library web sites. It organizes the papers in collections, has keywords (they call them tags), can automatically index the PDFs. The metadata is stored also on a remote server and you can browse through it using a web interface. You also get a Word and Openoffice plugins to insert citations in the papers you write. The plugins are a little rough around the edges, but are usable. The references formatting is very robust and comes with styles for a lot of journals.
Mendeley is stand alone application. I haven't tryed it yet,but is seems to have very similar functionality.
Nope. They are not touching the DNA.
Massive immune system response to the gene tinkering leading to immediate death.
They are injecting short nucleic acids that block a signal on RNA (a splice site) from being recognized which causes part of it to be skipped and at the end you get a shorter protein. The nucleic acid fragments are not immunogenic, and the shorter protein does not have any new sequences to which the immune system has not developed tolerance. So this is not real concern.
Some gene gets tinkered in the wrong spot and you get cancer too.
This is a concern when developing gene therapy. In this case this is not an issue, because you are not 'tinkering' with the gene. What they target is the RNA transcript of the gene.
Go through a costly and/or miserable treatment with no effect.
Short nucleic acids are cheap to make. The treatment is likely to be an IV injection every few weeks. Compared to slowly loosing your muscles and suffocating because you no longer have strength to bread this hardly qualifies as miserable.
This filing is in violation of my patent that covers the process of protecting your intellectual property by applying for a patent.
... do they promise additional cell phone batteries and a pocket air conditioning system to go along with it.
Yep, inflation is the key. If we crank it up say 10 000%, than one day may coin jar will be worth more than the national dept.
If the basic inputs like risk ratings, initial asset valuation, etc. are wrong you will get bad answers, no matter how well the model was built.
What exactly is the Zotero team violating?
Besides Zotero does not convert the '.ens' files to '.csl' or to anything else that is stored. It maps the fields on the fly when formatting the text.
Endnote is a pile of features added over time with no common design or any usability consideration. Its is not designed for operating systems with user level restrictions and it is barely aware of the existence of Internet. The only reason EndNote has been making money is the lack of competitors in its niche market.
Yeah, what is their false positive rate? I can get 100% "mal-intent" detection in a croud of jailing every single one of them. How about testing in an international airport, where jet-lagged passengers with limited command of English language are going through routine border control questions?
117?! This is an overkill. I can boil them down to 3 subatomic particles - electron, proton and neutron. Physicists, feel free to pitch in. Lets get to the bottom of these pesky diseases.
Dude, _read_ _the_ _fucking_ _article_! Their bases are not the stuff you can buy from the store. Look at the structures, they are not even going to pair with the regular bases. Their iG:iC pair uses DDA (donor, donor, acceptor) sequence of hydrogen bonds instead of ADD in the normal G:C pairs. I'll be surprised if you used similar 'alternate nucleotides' for the 'past 20 years' to 'create random mutations'. There is a practical use for these and is not for making 'random mutations'. Having alternative to DNA and RNA is one of the prerequisites in creating synthetic organisms with different genetics and biochemistry. Imagine starting the the evolution from scratch, or creating microbes for industry that can't exchange genetic information with the rest of the living organisms on earth.