Your argument puts the idea of the insurance on its head and thus makes no sense. If you are concerned about discrimination against healthy people, you should argue for dismantling the health insurance system altogether. This way everybody would pay the exact cost of the healthcare services they use.
Besides there is a very good scientific reason not to descriminate. We can't conclude defenitevly that a particular mutation is 'bad'. For example mutations causing betha-thalassemia are protective against malaria. Having genetic diversity is more beneficial for the population as a whole, than having what someone would percieve as 'healthy' genes.
DNA profiles are more like an md5 hash of your data DNA profile is definitely more than MD5 hash.
Similar to a fingerprint it identifies you, but unlike a fingerprint it also can be used to identify your relatives.
It can also be used (in theory) to infer hereditary medical conditions.
I think that without conviction or a court order this is an unwarranted invasion in the privacy of a person as well as his relatives which may not have anything to do with the crime being investigated.
Besides, it will be a long, long time before DNA can be properly "read" and not just "compared" Ever heard about "Deep Sequencing"? Using one of the new Solexa or 454 machines you can "properly read" quite a bit of persons DNA using tiny amounts of sample. If I remember correctly one flow cell in solexa will give you about 2-4 million 30nt reads, while 454 would get you less reads (200 000 - 300 000) but of a longer length (200-300nt).
Boeing is not CIA. If they start doing this, instead of an occasional employee spying for China, they will have half of their staff quiting and going to work for someone else (China for example).
You can add monopolies to that. There has been a lot of "consolidation" among the R&D suppliers. The competition in some fields is virtually nonexistent. The worst part is that the attitude of the suppliers is changing accordingly. A friend of mine recently complained about defective product and asked for replacement. What he got was a "shut the f*ck up or we will sue you" letter from their legal department.
Here is how the pricing usually works: "It costs $1 to make this molded plastic thing. We will price it $108, and if you bother to ask for a discount we will sell it to you for $55. You don't like the price, well go somewhere else? Oh wait, There is no other place we bought them all."
Most researchers pay up, because they have to do their experiments or they will not get more grant money. Besides, the grant money are coming mostly from taxes and nonprofits, so nobody really cares how they are spent. As a result we do lower quality research that costs more. The only way to cut down costs in the public domain is to import junior scientists from abroad (I am one of those imports, and I don't mind;)) and to use as many grad and undergrad students as you can.
Well that's exactly what the article implies if you read it to the end. They are investigating FCC for not being corrupt enough:
The cable operators are upset about the FCC's attempt to regulate their industry, along with the Commission's decision last year to nullify many of their exclusive contracts with apartment buildings. The telephone companies aren't thrilled about the FCC's 700MHz auction conditions (Verizon even sued), and everyone wants the FCC to keep away from their traffic monitoring and shaping practices.
That would please the industries regulated by the FCC. Multichannel News reports that AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast all bashed the agency in a CES panel yesterday, with each group wanting to see major changes in the way that the FCC operates
Perhaps the strongest criticism came from Verizon's Tom Tauke, who argued that the FCC just isn't set up to deal with the modern world.
"The FCC is structured about broadcast, cable and telephone," he said. "That isn't the world we are live in, and it isn't the world we are going to. The FCC has to be overhauled for the Internet world."
Here is my 2 cents. Fire 3/4 of the clowns in white shirts that play "security" at the airports. With the money saved train the rest how to use the x-ray machines and metal detectors and make sure they do use them. Add some random check (by random don't mean randomly chosen not very white looking people with strange names) and you are all set. How many people remember that the metal detectors actually detected the box cutters in the 9/11 hijackers only to get them waved by security that wouldn't be bothered with anything?
Good point. Mod the parent up
The argument in the article is that there is evidence that dinosaurs were hosts to parasites (big surprise), therefore the parasites killed them. This is as bogus as it can get. If there is a consistent record for parasites linked to dinosaur species, this can only mean that there were very long term relationships between hosts and parasites. The parent explains very well why this can not cause extinction.
There are also a bunch of other problems with their theory:
The article seems also to lack understanding on population dynamics. Any parasite that causes dramatic decrease in the host population will automatically decrease its chances of transmission and survival. This forms a negative feedback loop, which will allow the host population to recover. If the parasite does cause extinction (imagine HIV like virus), it will be limited to local area where it has originated. When the host is gone, the parasite goes with it. Insects have very limited ability to spread parasites across large distances. For this you need a parasite that can have an intermediate migrating host, which is largely unaffected by the parasite. But than this is fairly sophisticated parasite, which is very unlikely to cause host extinction (see parent for explanation).
What about the marine species? Were they also bitten by malaria carrying mosquitoes?
You my friend are absolutely wrong. The arguments boil down to who is "right" and who i "wrong", not who said what. You should let you girlfriend be "right" now and then, no mater what she said. Introduce the recorder in your arguments and you are going to get dumped instantly;))
I see your point. The best that I can come up with is a comparison to the output of comparable institutions both in US and abroad, based on number of articles and citations per article. This is far from perfect but at least it provides you with a reasonable benchmark.
Measuring scientific output is inherently difficult, because there is no fixed time frame between making a discovery and seeing the benefits for the society from this discovery. In fact a discovery may have an enormous impact but no immediate link to a specific product, service or anything else that we can reliably measure. How do you measure newly acquired knowledge? What is your benchmark? What time frame do you use to make the measurement?
So far the best bet has been for a society to commit tax money for basic research without putting time limits and milestones. Instead use a rigorous peer review system to ensure that money are not wasted. EU tried to grant research money based on the perceived 'benefit for the society' with the fifth and sixth frameworks for research and development (I am not familiar with the current framework) and failed miserably.
The government will be much more effective in controlling research costs if it enforces the basic rules designed to ensure competition in the economy. In the biomedical field there has been a wave of mergers and currently there are virtual monopolies established by few suppliers of equipment, consumables and reagents. As a result the prices have gone trough the roof. Fixing the FTC and the US patent law will do more in improving research efficiency than any metric of scientific output that you van come up with.
Except that a few years ago, the government doubled funding for the NIH and the number of published articles did not correlate.
This is the stupidest metric I have ever seen. You can't measure science like you do a pile of cucumbers.
Few years ago our lab was doing biochemistry research. When new grant money came in we added animal models to our research. This gives us the opportunity to see how processes that happen on the molecular level, affect the development and the behavior of the animals.
Do we produce twice as many paper? Of course not, the time scale of these experiments is months and years vs. days for pure biochemistry work. What we get is higher quality data and deeper understanding of the world around us.
But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?'"
What will happen is that the public will no longer support 'rigorous enforcement' of IP laws by entities like RIAA and the law will change accordingly. On the other hand of RIAA/MPAA consistently pulls off decent PR and lobbying campaigns in the next 10, 20, 30 years the status quo may remain and they will retain their business model.
I was thinking the same thing. In my country (Bulgaria) the nuclear power plant(s) were planed in combination with cascades of hydro dams. The idea was to use excess power during the night time to pump water from the lower dams to the upper dams, turning them both into water and energy storage. If there was need for more power during the day the hydro dams would supply it and the water will be held in the lower reservoirs. I don't see why this can't be applied to wind and solar power.
I get the sense that many Europeans don't really grok the scale out here, or more specifically the population density (or lack thereof).
Trust me, most of the Europeans do grok the scale you are talking about. Yet there is a way to serve this scale with efficient public transportation at half what you pay now for gas, insurance and oil changes for your car. I have seen it in working amazingly well in Germany. It is based on trains/subways for long to mid range travel and buses/trams to move the people from the train stations to the local neighborhoods. For your 44 mile commute you will spend about 40min to 1h a day.
I live now in LA and it will work very well here (imagine subway lines under the major highways), as well as in the majority of the mid to large population centers. Unfortunately it requires investment in infrastructure (read higher taxes) and pursuit of long term goals, both of which are big no-no for US voters.
On the other hand gas prices of about 5-6$/gallon may change the attitudes.
FTFA: "(Viewers) should learn that things don't glow if exposed to radiation," she said. "And they won't be radioactive after being exposed to radiation."
They most certainly do! There is scintillation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_(physics)and there is Cherenkov effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation You can clearly see the glow in the attached picture to the Cherenkov radiation artcle.
The radiation dose that and organism will survive strongly depends on the dna repair strategy that it uses. Rodents for example repair rapidly the actively used pieces of their genome and don't care so much for the parts that are not currently used. As a result they can survive higher doses compared to humans, but will pass more mutations to their progeny. High reproduction rate will help for a species to survive radiation exposure. Sure there will be lots of mutants in the progeny and most of them will probably not be very fit, but if you have big enough numbers this doesn't really matter.
Yet another scientific story with big claims and little detail.
2nM accuracy sounds a little overstated.
First the polyacrylamide gel is elastic.
Second they are using fluorescence to see the pattern and this at the very best has resolution of about 300nM.
Third they need to generate the pattern on the stamp first and there is no mention in the article what is the accuracy of that.
They seem to assume that the accuracy is equal to the DNA diameter.
I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span.
No need to run experiments like that. I can tell you what kind of art you will get in this case. It's called "cave art". Hell we can use stone axes too. Try figure what art will come out of that.
And what does "I mean, get out there -- communicate." is supposed to mean? I thought communication is all that internet is about.
That doesn't change the fact that CO2 is still the most significant greenhouse gas, by far.
No it isn't. Water vapor is the most significant. If you eliminate water vapor, than it is the most significant but not by far.
(which is actually a perfectly valid energy source, per mass and on an emissions basis with clean coal plants, and especially considering that actual, you know, energy production, and not just emissions, is a real concern) br>
There are a few other good energy sources. Nuclear for example. US has a problem with storing nuclear waste, but it is political, not practical problem. Can you point me to a working "clean coal plant" or is it another piece of vaporware? It does not reduce the CO2 emissions, at best you will be able to store temporarily some of them underground. And I have heard of even crazier ideas of pumping the CO2 deep in the ocean.
What are you trying to illustrate with this post? How selectively picking data can prove any point?
Why didn't you post the link to the entire article instead of linking to one of the figures?
Although CO2 is 3/4 of green house emissions it is not the most potent greenhouse gas and it isn't even the fastest growing greenhouse gas. That's why the Kyoto protocol includes methane, ozone, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, HFCs and PFCs.
The pacific institute article also has a valid point why 2000 is not a good reference point for the US CO2 emissions. There was a signifficant drop in air travel after 9/11 and the US economy was slowing down.
Of course, the issue is much, much more complex, and no one wants to take into consideration the very real economic impacts of taking drastic action to reduce emissions, especially when China and India - forget the EU - are not saddled with the same restrictions.
This type of argument stopped making sense to me shortly after I left elementary school. It is childish to say "I am doing it because he is doing it.". Besides, China and India do not have the output of greenhouse gases that US has, even if you do not calculate it per capita.
EU has restriction on carbon emissions. It also has a heavy 'ecology' tax on the gasoline and diesel fuels. EU countries (Germany and UK in particular) were phasing out coal as energy source for years, unlike US where coal use has been on the rise.
Who the hell gave you points for being informative?!
Slashdot Mirror
Now that people don't need to keep their hands on the inputs at any time, I can see revolution in internet porn coming our way.
Your argument puts the idea of the insurance on its head and thus makes no sense. If you are concerned about discrimination against healthy people, you should argue for dismantling the health insurance system altogether. This way everybody would pay the exact cost of the healthcare services they use. Besides there is a very good scientific reason not to descriminate. We can't conclude defenitevly that a particular mutation is 'bad'. For example mutations causing betha-thalassemia are protective against malaria. Having genetic diversity is more beneficial for the population as a whole, than having what someone would percieve as 'healthy' genes.
Boeing is not CIA. If they start doing this, instead of an occasional employee spying for China, they will have half of their staff quiting and going to work for someone else (China for example).
Oh yes, the 3G spectrum auctions in Europe .
You must be new here. You should have used "Imagine a Beowulf cluster out of those!" in this case.
You can add monopolies to that. There has been a lot of "consolidation" among the R&D suppliers. The competition in some fields is virtually nonexistent. The worst part is that the attitude of the suppliers is changing accordingly. A friend of mine recently complained about defective product and asked for replacement. What he got was a "shut the f*ck up or we will sue you" letter from their legal department.
Here is how the pricing usually works: "It costs $1 to make this molded plastic thing. We will price it $108, and if you bother to ask for a discount we will sell it to you for $55. You don't like the price, well go somewhere else? Oh wait, There is no other place we bought them all."
Most researchers pay up, because they have to do their experiments or they will not get more grant money. Besides, the grant money are coming mostly from taxes and nonprofits, so nobody really cares how they are spent. As a result we do lower quality research that costs more. The only way to cut down costs in the public domain is to import junior scientists from abroad (I am one of those imports, and I don't mind;)) and to use as many grad and undergrad students as you can.
Well that's exactly what the article implies if you read it to the end. They are investigating FCC for not being corrupt enough: The cable operators are upset about the FCC's attempt to regulate their industry, along with the Commission's decision last year to nullify many of their exclusive contracts with apartment buildings. The telephone companies aren't thrilled about the FCC's 700MHz auction conditions (Verizon even sued), and everyone wants the FCC to keep away from their traffic monitoring and shaping practices. That would please the industries regulated by the FCC. Multichannel News reports that AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast all bashed the agency in a CES panel yesterday, with each group wanting to see major changes in the way that the FCC operates Perhaps the strongest criticism came from Verizon's Tom Tauke, who argued that the FCC just isn't set up to deal with the modern world. "The FCC is structured about broadcast, cable and telephone," he said. "That isn't the world we are live in, and it isn't the world we are going to. The FCC has to be overhauled for the Internet world."
Here is my 2 cents. Fire 3/4 of the clowns in white shirts that play "security" at the airports. With the money saved train the rest how to use the x-ray machines and metal detectors and make sure they do use them. Add some random check (by random don't mean randomly chosen not very white looking people with strange names) and you are all set.
How many people remember that the metal detectors actually detected the box cutters in the 9/11 hijackers only to get them waved by security that wouldn't be bothered with anything?
Good point. Mod the parent up
The argument in the article is that there is evidence that dinosaurs were hosts to parasites (big surprise), therefore the parasites killed them. This is as bogus as it can get. If there is a consistent record for parasites linked to dinosaur species, this can only mean that there were very long term relationships between hosts and parasites. The parent explains very well why this can not cause extinction.
There are also a bunch of other problems with their theory:
The article seems also to lack understanding on population dynamics. Any parasite that causes dramatic decrease in the host population will automatically decrease its chances of transmission and survival. This forms a negative feedback loop, which will allow the host population to recover. If the parasite does cause extinction (imagine HIV like virus), it will be limited to local area where it has originated. When the host is gone, the parasite goes with it. Insects have very limited ability to spread parasites across large distances. For this you need a parasite that can have an intermediate migrating host, which is largely unaffected by the parasite. But than this is fairly sophisticated parasite, which is very unlikely to cause host extinction (see parent for explanation).
What about the marine species? Were they also bitten by malaria carrying mosquitoes?
You my friend are absolutely wrong. The arguments boil down to who is "right" and who i "wrong", not who said what. You should let you girlfriend be "right" now and then, no mater what she said. Introduce the recorder in your arguments and you are going to get dumped instantly;))
Measuring scientific output is inherently difficult, because there is no fixed time frame between making a discovery and seeing the benefits for the society from this discovery. In fact a discovery may have an enormous impact but no immediate link to a specific product, service or anything else that we can reliably measure. How do you measure newly acquired knowledge? What is your benchmark? What time frame do you use to make the measurement?
So far the best bet has been for a society to commit tax money for basic research without putting time limits and milestones. Instead use a rigorous peer review system to ensure that money are not wasted. EU tried to grant research money based on the perceived 'benefit for the society' with the fifth and sixth frameworks for research and development (I am not familiar with the current framework) and failed miserably.
The government will be much more effective in controlling research costs if it enforces the basic rules designed to ensure competition in the economy. In the biomedical field there has been a wave of mergers and currently there are virtual monopolies established by few suppliers of equipment, consumables and reagents. As a result the prices have gone trough the roof. Fixing the FTC and the US patent law will do more in improving research efficiency than any metric of scientific output that you van come up with.
This is the stupidest metric I have ever seen. You can't measure science like you do a pile of cucumbers.
Few years ago our lab was doing biochemistry research. When new grant money came in we added animal models to our research. This gives us the opportunity to see how processes that happen on the molecular level, affect the development and the behavior of the animals.
Do we produce twice as many paper? Of course not, the time scale of these experiments is months and years vs. days for pure biochemistry work. What we get is higher quality data and deeper understanding of the world around us.
What will happen is that the public will no longer support 'rigorous enforcement' of IP laws by entities like RIAA and the law will change accordingly. On the other hand of RIAA/MPAA consistently pulls off decent PR and lobbying campaigns in the next 10, 20, 30 years the status quo may remain and they will retain their business model.
"Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem." (J Stalin)
The only thing I don't get is why do you need to drop the bomb at supersonic speed.
I was thinking the same thing. In my country (Bulgaria) the nuclear power plant(s) were planed in combination with cascades of hydro dams. The idea was to use excess power during the night time to pump water from the lower dams to the upper dams, turning them both into water and energy storage. If there was need for more power during the day the hydro dams would supply it and the water will be held in the lower reservoirs. I don't see why this can't be applied to wind and solar power.
I get the sense that many Europeans don't really grok the scale out here, or more specifically the population density (or lack thereof).
Trust me, most of the Europeans do grok the scale you are talking about. Yet there is a way to serve this scale with efficient public transportation at half what you pay now for gas, insurance and oil changes for your car. I have seen it in working amazingly well in Germany. It is based on trains/subways for long to mid range travel and buses/trams to move the people from the train stations to the local neighborhoods. For your 44 mile commute you will spend about 40min to 1h a day.
I live now in LA and it will work very well here (imagine subway lines under the major highways), as well as in the majority of the mid to large population centers. Unfortunately it requires investment in infrastructure (read higher taxes) and pursuit of long term goals, both of which are big no-no for US voters.
On the other hand gas prices of about 5-6$/gallon may change the attitudes.
Nah, 0.39 nanoseconds sounds kinda small. 390 picoseconds will do a better job.
FTFA: "(Viewers) should learn that things don't glow if exposed to radiation," she said. "And they won't be radioactive after being exposed to radiation." They most certainly do! There is scintillation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_(physics)and there is Cherenkov effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation You can clearly see the glow in the attached picture to the Cherenkov radiation artcle. The radiation dose that and organism will survive strongly depends on the dna repair strategy that it uses. Rodents for example repair rapidly the actively used pieces of their genome and don't care so much for the parts that are not currently used. As a result they can survive higher doses compared to humans, but will pass more mutations to their progeny. High reproduction rate will help for a species to survive radiation exposure. Sure there will be lots of mutants in the progeny and most of them will probably not be very fit, but if you have big enough numbers this doesn't really matter.
Yet another scientific story with big claims and little detail. 2nM accuracy sounds a little overstated. First the polyacrylamide gel is elastic. Second they are using fluorescence to see the pattern and this at the very best has resolution of about 300nM. Third they need to generate the pattern on the stamp first and there is no mention in the article what is the accuracy of that. They seem to assume that the accuracy is equal to the DNA diameter.
I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span.
No need to run experiments like that. I can tell you what kind of art you will get in this case. It's called "cave art". Hell we can use stone axes too. Try figure what art will come out of that.
And what does "I mean, get out there -- communicate." is supposed to mean? I thought communication is all that internet is about.
That doesn't change the fact that CO2 is still the most significant greenhouse gas, by far.
No it isn't. Water vapor is the most significant. If you eliminate water vapor, than it is the most significant but not by far.
(which is actually a perfectly valid energy source, per mass and on an emissions basis with clean coal plants, and especially considering that actual, you know, energy production, and not just emissions, is a real concern)
br> There are a few other good energy sources. Nuclear for example. US has a problem with storing nuclear waste, but it is political, not practical problem. Can you point me to a working "clean coal plant" or is it another piece of vaporware? It does not reduce the CO2 emissions, at best you will be able to store temporarily some of them underground. And I have heard of even crazier ideas of pumping the CO2 deep in the ocean.
What are you trying to illustrate with this post? How selectively picking data can prove any point? Why didn't you post the link to the entire article instead of linking to one of the figures?
Although CO2 is 3/4 of green house emissions it is not the most potent greenhouse gas and it isn't even the fastest growing greenhouse gas. That's why the Kyoto protocol includes methane, ozone, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, HFCs and PFCs.
The pacific institute article also has a valid point why 2000 is not a good reference point for the US CO2 emissions. There was a signifficant drop in air travel after 9/11 and the US economy was slowing down.
Of course, the issue is much, much more complex, and no one wants to take into consideration the very real economic impacts of taking drastic action to reduce emissions, especially when China and India - forget the EU - are not saddled with the same restrictions.
This type of argument stopped making sense to me shortly after I left elementary school. It is childish to say "I am doing it because he is doing it.". Besides, China and India do not have the output of greenhouse gases that US has, even if you do not calculate it per capita.
EU has restriction on carbon emissions. It also has a heavy 'ecology' tax on the gasoline and diesel fuels. EU countries (Germany and UK in particular) were phasing out coal as energy source for years, unlike US where coal use has been on the rise. Who the hell gave you points for being informative?!
...trying to charge their batteries with diet coke.