Before iMac the colour choice for your computer was along the line of, beige, off white or ivory (ie all shades of beige). iMac comes along, and all of a sudden you can buy a personal computer that isn't beige. All major PC manufactures have almost stop making beige computers (though now the new beige is black).
The iMac showed people wanted good looking computers on there desk, and for many people the computer is just like a couch or a table or even a toaster, where the purchase decision is based on both practicality and asthetics.
I'm Australian, and I remember it worked in our favour for the Starwars Attack of the Clones atleast. Special screenings just after the stroke of midnight on the day of release, 12 hours before the yanks.
Ahh well, new years in the Australia or New Zealand still rocks. Nothing quite like watching the sun rise over the ocean (say around byron bay somewhere) after a long night partying to end the celebration of a new year.
Well it's the premiere, so it is an invite only kind of deal.
Kiwis will have the first opportunity to see it when it is officially released to. Comes from being on the right side of the international date line, it's the official date for release a good 12hrs ahead of the US. Also makes for good new years celebration, the first to see in the new year and it's the middle of summer to (so big outdoor parties etc.).
Yep, seeing that Chicago is pretty much the financial and trading center of the midwest. Built as the trading h
I have heard the eastern bit of the midwest referred to as the "mideast". Though it's not that common. Probably because there worried Texas will get it's geography mixed up and invade Michigan and Ohio for their oil.
Your point? where did they say the ipod was defective?
This article is about the tradeoffs in the design of the ipod, it then presents a number of players that have a different set of tradeoffs that may suit a particular purpose or budget better.
If the Ipod makes a read and I severely jar it at the same time (drop it etc), I can do some seriously damage to the harddisk. The flash player is a fundamentally more robust design as it has no moving parts, it's that simple. Admittedly the ipod is pretty robust, so as long as your sensible it isn't a major problem. But some people (like me) tend to be a bit rough wth portable equipment, like portable cd players, phones and even my poor suffering laptop (almost all of it still works). Me running around in my absent minded way with a working harddisk in my pocket is a recipe for a toasted ipod.
For me, bibliographic software. Huge deal breaker for academic writers. There is a tool included already but it is severly lacking in features and easy of use, lacks ability to import from other databases or from say pubmed etc., and most stupid of all has a character limit on the titles and the author section that is far to short.
Result is academic will use latex or some other related tool (like lyx) with one of the multitude of powerful bibliographic tools written for it, or you use word with endnote.
There is an incubator project to improve things that looks very promising though. Planning to first get the current system basically usable as quickly as possible, and then a longer term goal of a total rewrite to get a solid solution. So maybe by version 2.0
This is pretty critical point for academics, an audience where open source software is traditionally well accepted and utilised.
It's basic, but it probably works well enough, if anything it is to small and fiddly to work. But the arguments I see here is between digital and vinyl. It's a mute point as most DJ's use both.
There is already a number of professional product for mixing digital music. The notables being the the pioneer cd player series, and final scratch for mp3 play-back. And are used extensively by many DJ's. Often to augment their vinyl setups.
Still vinyl and 1200 setup is still the best playback and mixing medium, and if you are the battling DJ except no substitutes. So why do DJ's atleast partially use mp3/cd players.
1-same reason that tape decks were sometime used back in the day (look up the history of the development of techno and house). Want to test out a new track you've just got a rough cut of, or you got a cool mp3 in you email from a friend/CD in the mail, and want to test it out on the dance floor, it's not like you are going to cut a dub plate for that is it.
2- weight- cd's are lighter than records. Mp3's weigh only as much as the medium they are on. This is a huge deal for travelling DJ's and their backs. Less weight means more tunes they can take with them, which means a more varied set for us, the club going public.
3-theft damage and baggage loss. Theft or damage of rare or impossible to replace records is a real pain, instead back it up as an Mp3 or CD.
4- for a starter DJ Getting a large enough collection of Vinyl can be f****** expensive. mmmm- piracy. Heh I know it's wrong but tell that to a 15 year old aspiring DJ.
So this is the real emphasis here, DJ's are, and will continue to use both vinyl and digital medium. This little box is just the cheap hobby/starter DJ version of this, It will allow someone to develop their skills and use their Mp3 collection, but won't standup to night after night of use and abuse. Just like the stack of cheap vinyl turntables and mixers out there.
Or you could do the same, except buy one real textbook, and photocopy the rest.
Or even better simply scan every page, and make it into a suitable format to read on a compute, save on photocopy fees.
Their is very little stopping anyone in your class currently getting hold of a reasonable fast scanner or photcopiers and going stupid. It just takes a bit of time, but probably not as much as actually figuring out how to download it from amazon.
"It is also weird because, here, they have almost every textbook in the library on short loan so you don't even really need to buy the textbooks."
These, and other ways that lecturers can use to allow student who can't afford a text book to use it is why the cost is lower.
If the textbook costs to much the student's say bugger off, I need that money for beer,and off they go to the library. Or buy second hand the previous edition, or photocopy someone elses copy. Consequently there may be a required text, but there isn't a necessity to buy it, andif you cut too deep into to the precious beer funds of student,you won't sell many textbooks.
The only thing is why are American university student in general so willing to over pay for books? Must be because american beer is crap I guess.
Bad analogy if you know the facts. Sorry to be pedantic.
A standard practice for cars of the early part of this century (upto the forties in some cases), was the manufacturer to produce a rolling chassis with all the mechanicals and to have a coach builder to construct the a body. These often were old companies that used to make horsedrawn carriges.
Also heavy spoked wooden wheels were very often used through the twenties atleast, these often made third pary wheel manufactures (often the ones that used to make horsedrawn wheels).
A classic example is Holden, which is now the australia division of GM. It started as a coach builder manufacture of horse drawn carriages, it then made car bodies for imported cars which came in as rolling chassis. Then in the fifties could see they had to change tack and introduced their own car and became a manufacturer. To be eventually acquired by GM.
The skills used in horse drawn carriage building were used extensively by the early automobile industry.
Immigration policies generally are worked out between governments, and follow a kind of we'll treat you like like you treat us approach.If a US makes difficult to get a visa for citizens from a country, that country (often more symbolically than anything) does the same to american citizens.
I'm absolutely sure that if he had a company willing to sponsor his visa application into india he would have had no problems.
Some times two nations are able to negotiate special terms for their citizens allowing a greater degree of freedom of movement between them. Good examples being the US and canada, australia and new zealand, and the european union.But usually there has to be a good reason to enter a country to work, you have special skills, a company is sponsoring you or your filthy rich.
If anything america has some of the strictest policies, and by far the rudest and most arrogant immigration staff around, (from talks with many international students, and post doctoral workers in the US and my own personal experience).
I have a feeling the guy didn't do anything more than call the indian embassy and ask to enter india to find work, and of course he got rebuked. An indian would have to lucky even to get through to the US emabassy on the phone in India, let alone hope to be allowed to enter the US on the vague hope of finding work.
Doctors salaries of 28K a year would make healthcare significantly cheaper would it not?
Well maybe not that much, but American doctors compared to the rest of the world (I'm talking developed nations here) are simply overpaid, I guess it comes from being from the most effective and untouchable unions in the country (the AMA). Sure other countries equivalents of the AMA are just the same, but when the government is directly paying for healthcare they have a bigger motivation to keep them in line.
Also universal healthcare done well could significantly decrease cost per person by streamlining the whole administration of healthcare (because it's well Universal, ie the same for everyone). Healthcare in america is just full of red tape to make sense of all the different insurance companies and policies and what they cover, and all the various state and federal funds for this or that. It's not consistant, and so cost alot to make work, that's if you think the healthsystem actually works at all.
This song is ironic as a whole. It's a song about irony (implied by the title) but nothing in the song is ironic, that is ironic by itself.
This sets up a paradox though, if the song is ironic because none of the lyrics are ironic yet the title implies that they should be. Well then the title makes sense and is not ironic anymore. Go back to step one rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
Detroit to Perth, for those people who don't know. Perth happens to be the major city furthest from the east coast of the usa.
I'm a Perth boy living in Ann Arbor Michigan. So I have done this (not this particular route though). A couple of days of flying and floating around airports is not fun.
You know your along way from home when your cheapest option to get home is an around the world ticket.
..or PBS for short is the drug subsidising program of Australias social health system. It provides government subsidised prescription drugs (often 75% of the cost or higher) to every australian as long as it is part of the extensive list of drugs that is PBS subsidised.
A drug may be approved for actual sale in australia, but until it is on the PBS list it is unlikely to be very often prescribed, especially if there is a suitable equivalent drug on the list. What does this mean, "me to" drugs from different companies that treat the same conditions or for a drug with only a marginal benefit usually are sold at a much lower overal cost (before the subsidy is included) compared to the US. The commitee of health professionals that decides which drugs are included are able to negotiate with drug companies from a very strong position, if the companies don't get their drug on the list, they won't sell much of that drug in Australia.
Effectively it is a system for the whole of australia to bargain with drug companies as one large block. And is the reason Australia has one of the lowest (for a while was the lowest, not sure at the moment) per capita spending on drugs in the develop world. Oh and the drug companies absolutely hate it.
There was the guy in my honours year that as part of his project made a contraption that was a large metal drum with a hose at the bottom where air could be drawn through, this air was passed through a 20 litre drum of water with a standard vacuum cleaner at the other end to suck all the air through.
The project was looking at chemical compounds in wood smoke, and so used the water to trap some of these components for study.
He showed pictures of this thing in his seminar and described it in his thesis. It was about 15 minutes after the seminar everybody started to realise he had built a really really really big bong.
How about if RSI has been an occupational hazard since the 19th century.
Telegraph operators spent their working lives pounding out dots and dashes on a vertical up and down key. And many developed a condition that was then called "Glass Arm", but is now called RSI.
In fact there were many designs for ergonomic keys that worked sideways instead vertical, the most popular and effective was the Bug (invented in 1904) which would make a dash when held in one direction and a series of dots when held in the other, requiring far less movement to operate.
It has been known for over a century that repetative up and down movements of the fingers and wrist, similar to that involved in typing, can cause a longterm painful injury to the wrists.
The radiation exposure badges are often supplied by some sort of government or highly regulated agency charged with the job of monitoring occupational exposure to radiation.
In Australia there is the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. Essentially this provides the badges (at a cost) and performs the regular ( every 3 months at the most) measurement of dose.
This measurement is added to a file of your lifelong exposure to radiation(in Australia only). So anytime you can find out how much radiation you have received from work over your lifetime, and for continuing studies into the effects of low level radiation, like how much does one mS a year increase our chance of cancer.
Usually this service is supplied to people who have some sort of reason to work with, and also accreditation to use radioactive sources. So this could be difficult for backyard experimentors.
I went to a well respected PSA private boarding school in Perth. Most of my friends have either left Perth or are leaving Perth, including myself (doing a PhD in the eastern states of Australia). The fact that the school has regular reunions in London tells the same story.
Perth is a great city to live in, (I love it to death). It's just that it doesn't have the career prospects and the ability to progress that other places do. And it is the most isolated city in the world, when you leave it is a long way back (eg. to fly Sydney-Perth return is around $550 and Sydney-London is about $850 return, the rest of Australia is almost as far away as the rest of the world to Perth).
Interestingly enough many people whole left W.A. for careers overseas are retiring back to WA, like the head of the research Division at a very large Pharmaceutical company retiring to Margaret River WA, and why wouldn't you?
I want to live in Perth but I don't think there is much prospect of me returning unless I eventually become an academic at one of the University at Home, (my mother is now finally resigned to this fact).
Ahh well, I'm having a holiday at home in about a months time, I just can't wait. Good pubs, beaches and people what more do you want?
I think ABC along with SBS, provide an excellent counter weight to the commercial free to air TV and radio stations.
Both the news segments on ABC TV and radio and SBS are excellent. ABC's news provides a commercially and politically (mostly) unbiased review of events around Australia and the world, while SBS provides a broader, not anglosised or americanised, review of world events.
Although the commercial news segments are not to bad, they suffer badly from the CNN cut and paste disease, and that mindless fluffy filler crap. Why produce interesting indepth news stories of particular interest to Australians when they can just copy something from the US or the UK?
It is current affairs that really show the differences between the ABC and the commercial stations. Apart from, as talked about in the speech nine's Sunday program, the commercial current affairs programs rarely deal intelligently with topically issues of the day, instead simply go into tabloid sensationalism.
The hilarious show "Frontline", a satire based around the production of a fictional commercial nightly current affairs program. This show worked so well because the real current affairs programs were already nearly a farce.
The ABC current affairs shows, from the nightly indepth review of current events of "the 7:30 report" and "lateline", to the documentary style indepth look at one issue by "Four Corners" the current affairs shows are just incompareable to the commercial crap like "a current affair" which I find unbearable to watch.
As another an aside. I live in a country town in Australia. The ABC youth radio station triple J is an excellent service, providing both interesting non mainstream music from Australia and overseas. It is a godsend when compared to the crap the commercial radio stations play, as well as doing a lot to push Australian music.
Anyway I think The ABC provides an excellent service for the tax dollars spent on it. But can it maintain their standards with anymore budget cuts? I hope so.
Your right, the reasson that everybody is calling them L and R is that not many people on slashdot are chemists.
Anyway they are R and S, according to IUPAC naming conventions. Unless you are working with carbohydrates, or other biological materials, then it is D and L, which is related back to the absolute configuration of Glyceraldehyde If I am not mistaken.
The absolute configuration can be determined experimentally by X-ray crystallalography. Essentially it is a way to obtain the configuration of a molecule in 3 D spcce, and this includes the absolute configuration around a stereo centre. There are other ways that are more abstracted,in that you use the properties of already determined molecule to determine the configuration, like chiral HPLC, or synthesize the compound from appropriate optically active compounds.
If they do, just go to the relevant public access television stations in the major capital cities.
They won't give a stuff. It would be good publicity for the stations, and the aim of the exercise, which is to broadcast to as many people who choose to record it as posssible would be acheived. (Even if nobody watches public access, it still can be received by a lot of people).
You have missed one essential point. I haven't read any information about how this was done, or what organism, but assuming it is within the chromosomal DNA and organism, (bacteria or even better a rat), and no way to pick out the insert, or mutations in the DNA apart from the secret primers then it really is hard to crack. For a start, there is already a lot of DNA in higher organism chromosomes that is junk, it doensn't encode anything, a little bit more would hardly stand out. The shear amount of other information is staggering. And the most important, you assume that you can read the relevant DNA sequence instantaniously, think again. If you have no idea where the message is likely to be, then you probably have to sequence the whole genome again to make sure that the relevant coding region has been read. This could take years!!! Where as if you have the primers, you can easily select our the relevant portion of the code using PCR, and sequence the relevant section. All of maybe a day or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Except one thing, iMacs broke the beige barrier.
Before iMac the colour choice for your computer was along the line of, beige, off white or ivory (ie all shades of beige). iMac comes along, and all of a sudden you can buy a personal computer that isn't beige. All major PC manufactures have almost stop making beige computers (though now the new beige is black).
The iMac showed people wanted good looking computers on there desk, and for many people the computer is just like a couch or a table or even a toaster, where the purchase decision is based on both practicality and asthetics.
That truly sucks.
I'm Australian, and I remember it worked in our favour for the Starwars Attack of the Clones atleast. Special screenings just after the stroke of midnight on the day of release, 12 hours before the yanks.
Ahh well, new years in the Australia or New Zealand still rocks. Nothing quite like watching the sun rise over the ocean (say around byron bay somewhere) after a long night partying to end the celebration of a new year.
Well it's the premiere, so it is an invite only kind of deal.
Kiwis will have the first opportunity to see it when it is officially released to. Comes from being on the right side of the international date line, it's the official date for release a good 12hrs ahead of the US. Also makes for good new years celebration, the first to see in the new year and it's the middle of summer to (so big outdoor parties etc.).
Yep, seeing that Chicago is pretty much the financial and trading center of the midwest. Built as the trading h
I have heard the eastern bit of the midwest referred to as the "mideast". Though it's not that common. Probably because there worried Texas will get it's geography mixed up and invade Michigan and Ohio for their oil.
Your point? where did they say the ipod was defective?
This article is about the tradeoffs in the design of the ipod, it then presents a number of players that have a different set of tradeoffs that may suit a particular purpose or budget better.
If the Ipod makes a read and I severely jar it at the same time (drop it etc), I can do some seriously damage to the harddisk. The flash player is a fundamentally more robust design as it has no moving parts, it's that simple. Admittedly the ipod is pretty robust, so as long as your sensible it isn't a major problem. But some people (like me) tend to be a bit rough wth portable equipment, like portable cd players, phones and even my poor suffering laptop (almost all of it still works). Me running around in my absent minded way with a working harddisk in my pocket is a recipe for a toasted ipod.
Yeh, well it still has some way to go.
For me, bibliographic software. Huge deal breaker for academic writers. There is a tool included already but it is severly lacking in features and easy of use, lacks ability to import from other databases or from say pubmed etc., and most stupid of all has a character limit on the titles and the author section that is far to short.
Result is academic will use latex or some other related tool (like lyx) with one of the multitude of powerful bibliographic tools written for it, or you use word with endnote.
There is an incubator project to improve things that looks very promising though. Planning to first get the current system basically usable as quickly as possible, and then a longer term goal of a total rewrite to get a solid solution. So maybe by version 2.0
This is pretty critical point for academics, an audience where open source software is traditionally well accepted and utilised.
It's basic, but it probably works well enough, if anything it is to small and fiddly to work. But the arguments I see here is between digital and vinyl. It's a mute point as most DJ's use both.
There is already a number of professional product for mixing digital music. The notables being the the pioneer cd player series, and final scratch for mp3 play-back. And are used extensively by many DJ's. Often to augment their vinyl setups.
Still vinyl and 1200 setup is still the best playback and mixing medium, and if you are the battling DJ except no substitutes. So why do DJ's atleast partially use mp3/cd players.
1-same reason that tape decks were sometime used back in the day (look up the history of the development of techno and house). Want to test out a new track you've just got a rough cut of, or you got a cool mp3 in you email from a friend/CD in the mail, and want to test it out on the dance floor, it's not like you are going to cut a dub plate for that is it.
2- weight- cd's are lighter than records. Mp3's weigh only as much as the medium they are on. This is a huge deal for travelling DJ's and their backs. Less weight means more tunes they can take with them, which means a more varied set for us, the club going public.
3-theft damage and baggage loss. Theft or damage of rare or impossible to replace records is a real pain, instead back it up as an Mp3 or CD.
4- for a starter DJ Getting a large enough collection of Vinyl can be f****** expensive. mmmm- piracy. Heh I know it's wrong but tell that to a 15 year old aspiring DJ.
So this is the real emphasis here, DJ's are, and will continue to use both vinyl and digital medium. This little box is just the cheap hobby/starter DJ version of this, It will allow someone to develop their skills and use their Mp3 collection, but won't standup to night after night of use and abuse. Just like the stack of cheap vinyl turntables and mixers out there.
Or you could do the same, except buy one real textbook, and photocopy the rest.
Or even better simply scan every page, and make it into a suitable format to read on a compute, save on photocopy fees.
Their is very little stopping anyone in your class currently getting hold of a reasonable fast scanner or photcopiers and going stupid. It just takes a bit of time, but probably not as much as actually figuring out how to download it from amazon.
"It is also weird because, here, they have almost every textbook in the library on short loan so you don't even really need to buy the textbooks."
These, and other ways that lecturers can use to allow student who can't afford a text book to use it is why the cost is lower.
If the textbook costs to much the student's say bugger off, I need that money for beer,and off they go to the library. Or buy second hand the previous edition, or photocopy someone elses copy. Consequently there may be a required text, but there isn't a necessity to buy it, andif you cut too deep into to the precious beer funds of student,you won't sell many textbooks.
The only thing is why are American university student in general so willing to over pay for books? Must be because american beer is crap I guess.
Bad analogy if you know the facts. Sorry to be pedantic.
A standard practice for cars of the early part of this century (upto the forties in some cases), was the manufacturer to produce a rolling chassis with all the mechanicals and to have a coach builder to construct the a body. These often were old companies that used to make horsedrawn carriges.
Also heavy spoked wooden wheels were very often used through the twenties atleast, these often made third pary wheel manufactures (often the ones that used to make horsedrawn wheels).
A classic example is Holden, which is now the australia division of GM. It started as a coach builder manufacture of horse drawn carriages, it then made car bodies for imported cars which came in as rolling chassis. Then in the fifties could see they had to change tack and introduced their own car and became a manufacturer. To be eventually acquired by GM.
The skills used in horse drawn carriage building were used extensively by the early automobile industry.
Immigration policies generally are worked out between governments, and follow a kind of we'll treat you like like you treat us approach.If a US makes difficult to get a visa for citizens from a country, that country (often more symbolically than anything) does the same to american citizens.
I'm absolutely sure that if he had a company willing to sponsor his visa application into india he would have had no problems.
Some times two nations are able to negotiate special terms for their citizens allowing a greater degree of freedom of movement between them. Good examples being the US and canada, australia and new zealand, and the european union.But usually there has to be a good reason to enter a country to work, you have special skills, a company is sponsoring you or your filthy rich.
If anything america has some of the strictest policies, and by far the rudest and most arrogant immigration staff around, (from talks with many international students, and post doctoral workers in the US and my own personal experience).
I have a feeling the guy didn't do anything more than call the indian embassy and ask to enter india to find work, and of course he got rebuked. An indian would have to lucky even to get through to the US emabassy on the phone in India, let alone hope to be allowed to enter the US on the vague hope of finding work.
You answered your own question really.
Doctors salaries of 28K a year would make healthcare significantly cheaper would it not?
Well maybe not that much, but American doctors compared to the rest of the world (I'm talking developed nations here) are simply overpaid, I guess it comes from being from the most effective and untouchable unions in the country (the AMA). Sure other countries equivalents of the AMA are just the same, but when the government is directly paying for healthcare they have a bigger motivation to keep them in line.
Also universal healthcare done well could significantly decrease cost per person by streamlining the whole administration of healthcare (because it's well Universal, ie the same for everyone). Healthcare in america is just full of red tape to make sense of all the different insurance companies and policies and what they cover, and all the various state and federal funds for this or that. It's not consistant, and so cost alot to make work, that's if you think the healthsystem actually works at all.
This song is ironic as a whole. It's a song about irony (implied by the title) but nothing in the song is ironic, that is ironic by itself.
This sets up a paradox though, if the song is ironic because none of the lyrics are ironic yet the title implies that they should be. Well then the title makes sense and is not ironic anymore. Go back to step one rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
Detroit to Perth, for those people who don't know. Perth happens to be the major city furthest from the east coast of the usa.
I'm a Perth boy living in Ann Arbor Michigan. So I have done this (not this particular route though). A couple of days of flying and floating around airports is not fun.
You know your along way from home when your cheapest option to get home is an around the world ticket.
..or PBS for short is the drug subsidising program of Australias social health system. It provides government subsidised prescription drugs (often 75% of the cost or higher) to every australian as long as it is part of the extensive list of drugs that is PBS subsidised.
A drug may be approved for actual sale in australia, but until it is on the PBS list it is unlikely to be very often prescribed, especially if there is a suitable equivalent drug on the list. What does this mean, "me to" drugs from different companies that treat the same conditions or for a drug with only a marginal benefit usually are sold at a much lower overal cost (before the subsidy is included) compared to the US.
The commitee of health professionals that decides which drugs are included are able to negotiate with drug companies from a very strong position, if the companies don't get their drug on the list, they won't sell much of that drug in Australia.
Effectively it is a system for the whole of australia to bargain with drug companies as one large block. And is the reason Australia has one of the lowest (for a while was the lowest, not sure at the moment) per capita spending on drugs in the develop world. Oh and the drug companies absolutely hate it.
There was the guy in my honours year that as part of his project made a contraption that was a large metal drum with a hose at the bottom where air could be drawn through, this air was passed through a 20 litre drum of water with a standard vacuum cleaner at the other end to suck all the air through.
The project was looking at chemical compounds in wood smoke, and so used the water to trap some of these components for study.
He showed pictures of this thing in his seminar and described it in his thesis. It was about 15 minutes after the seminar everybody started to realise he had built a really really really big bong.
How about if RSI has been an occupational hazard since the 19th century.
Telegraph operators spent their working lives pounding out dots and dashes on a vertical up and down key. And many developed a condition that was then called "Glass Arm", but is now called RSI.
In fact there were many designs for ergonomic keys that worked sideways instead vertical, the most popular and effective was the Bug (invented in 1904) which would make a dash when held in one direction and a series of dots when held in the other, requiring far less movement to operate.
It has been known for over a century that repetative up and down movements of the fingers and wrist, similar to that involved in typing, can cause a longterm painful injury to the wrists.
The radiation exposure badges are often supplied by some sort of government or highly regulated agency charged with the job of monitoring occupational exposure to radiation.
In Australia there is the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. Essentially this provides the badges (at a cost) and performs the regular ( every 3 months at the most) measurement of dose.
This measurement is added to a file of your lifelong exposure to radiation(in Australia only). So anytime you can find out how much radiation you have received from work over your lifetime, and for continuing studies into the effects of low level radiation, like how much does one mS a year increase our chance of cancer.
Usually this service is supplied to people who have some sort of reason to work with, and also accreditation to use radioactive sources. So this could be difficult for backyard experimentors.
>(preparatory to the government demolishing the >school at the end of the year -- nice one, >Richard).
Well this is the kind of pain you should expect when you've got a Dick Court.
(For non West Australians Richard Court is the current W.A. Premier.)
Same here.
I went to a well respected PSA private boarding school in Perth. Most of my friends have either left Perth or are leaving Perth, including myself (doing a PhD in the eastern states of Australia). The fact that the school has regular reunions in London tells the same story.
Perth is a great city to live in, (I love it to death). It's just that it doesn't have the career prospects and the ability to progress that other places do. And it is the most isolated city in the world, when you leave it is a long way back (eg. to fly Sydney-Perth return is around $550 and Sydney-London is about $850 return, the rest of Australia is almost as far away as the rest of the world to Perth).
Interestingly enough many people whole left W.A. for careers overseas are retiring back to WA, like the head of the research Division at a very large Pharmaceutical company retiring to Margaret River WA, and why wouldn't you?
I want to live in Perth but I don't think there is much prospect of me returning unless I eventually become an academic at one of the University at Home, (my mother is now finally resigned to this fact).
Ahh well, I'm having a holiday at home in about a months time, I just can't wait. Good pubs, beaches and people what more do you want?
I think ABC along with SBS, provide an excellent counter weight to the commercial free to air TV and radio stations.
Both the news segments on ABC TV and radio and SBS are excellent. ABC's news provides a commercially and politically (mostly) unbiased review of events around Australia and the world, while SBS provides a broader, not anglosised or americanised, review of world events.
Although the commercial news segments are not to bad, they suffer badly from the CNN cut and paste disease, and that mindless fluffy filler crap. Why produce interesting indepth news stories of particular interest to Australians when they can just copy something from the US or the UK?
It is current affairs that really show the differences between the ABC and the commercial stations. Apart from, as talked about in the speech nine's Sunday program, the commercial current affairs programs rarely deal intelligently with topically issues of the day, instead simply go into tabloid sensationalism.
The hilarious show "Frontline", a satire based around the production of a fictional commercial nightly current affairs program. This show worked so well because the real current affairs programs were already nearly a farce.
The ABC current affairs shows, from the nightly indepth review of current events of "the 7:30 report" and "lateline", to the documentary style indepth look at one issue by "Four Corners" the current affairs shows are just incompareable to the commercial crap like "a current affair" which I find unbearable to watch.
As another an aside. I live in a country town in Australia. The ABC youth radio station triple J is an excellent service, providing both interesting non mainstream music from Australia and overseas. It is a godsend when compared to the crap the commercial radio stations play, as well as doing a lot to push Australian music.
Anyway I think The ABC provides an excellent service for the tax dollars spent on it. But can it maintain their standards with anymore budget cuts? I hope so.
Your right, the reasson that everybody is calling them L and R is that not many people on slashdot are chemists.
Anyway they are R and S, according to IUPAC naming conventions. Unless you are working with carbohydrates, or other biological materials, then it is D and L, which is related back to the absolute configuration of Glyceraldehyde If I am not mistaken.
The absolute configuration can be determined experimentally by X-ray crystallalography. Essentially it is a way to obtain the configuration of a molecule in 3 D spcce, and this includes the absolute configuration around a stereo centre. There are other ways that are more abstracted,in that you use the properties of already determined molecule to determine the configuration, like chiral HPLC, or synthesize the compound from appropriate optically active compounds.
If they do, just go to the relevant public access television stations in the major capital cities.
They won't give a stuff. It would be good publicity for the stations, and the aim of the exercise, which is to broadcast to as many people who choose to record it as posssible would be acheived. (Even if nobody watches public access, it still can be received by a lot of people).
You have missed one essential point. I haven't read any information about how this was done, or what organism, but assuming it is within the chromosomal DNA and organism, (bacteria or even better a rat), and no way to pick out the insert, or mutations in the DNA apart from the secret primers then it really is hard to crack. For a start, there is already a lot of DNA in higher organism chromosomes that is junk, it doensn't encode anything, a little bit more would hardly stand out. The shear amount of other information is staggering. And the most important, you assume that you can read the relevant DNA sequence instantaniously, think again. If you have no idea where the message is likely to be, then you probably have to sequence the whole genome again to make sure that the relevant coding region has been read. This could take years!!! Where as if you have the primers, you can easily select our the relevant portion of the code using PCR, and sequence the relevant section. All of maybe a day or two.