Unfortunately, there isn't enough veggie oil to completely replace gas. It is a great idea (I'm even on the board of directors of a small bio-fuel co-op that sells veggie oil at a pump), but it will always be a niche market that is only part of a broader energy solution.
You might even say that our workplaces are ruled by a king, or at least a junta, whose powers are very much in the medieval mold.
Too true.
Recently at work, we had a round of performance reviews, and apparently the VP of HR has been routinely overriding individual managers' reviews of the people they supervise, even though the VP has no first-hand experience working with any of these people.
I'm starting to wonder if the idea of encouraging hard work through good morale and mutual respect has completely died.
Don't forget the study showing that older parents are more likely to produce offspring with autism. Oh, and fertility treatments seem to be linked as well.
Nice try, but that would imply that somehow parents bear some form of responsibility, which is unthinkable.
Clearly, the evil corporation did it, because someone (else) has to be blamed, right?
A good friend of mine is a public school teacher, and as his own daughter is about to start school, he's considering home-schooling.
Why?
Simply put - he wants her to learn and to be excited about learning. He recently watched a previously home-schooled girl enter high school brimming with questions. She asked all sorts of things, eager to learn. Then, after a few weeks, the questions stopped.
Apparently, her parents were interested in education and instilled in her a spirit to learn. The trouble is that by the time kids reach high school, they don't give a rat's ass about learning and education and those who do are stigmatized.
And no, I don't have any solutions. I suggest talk to teachers, then ignoring what 90% of them say.
I agree whole-heartedly. She made a simple, honest mistake that could be made by anyone with little knowledge of computers.
The real trouble, that I don't expect hear voiced very well on slashdot, is the tech support person at Dell. When she called to try to switch her OS, that person had no business talking her out of it. She was not open to trying Ubuntu. She was not interested in anything other than Windows. Talking her into keeping something she didn't want was reckless and irresponsible and does more to hurt the cause of FOSS than to help it.
You want to encourage people to use Linux? Great - do so with one-on-one discussions and careful mentoring.
Oddly enough, there is a correlation - people who pad their responses to look like a "good employee" also tend to have higher job performance ratings, at least as it appears to their supervisors
Herein lies one of my biggest complaints about management and systems like these tests. In the end, the metrics that the execs pay attention to really don't have anything at all to do with the real value that an employee offers to a company. If you impose a test, people will cheat the test. If you measure all progress according to a few metrics, people will spend all of their time optimizing those metrics.
People aren't dumb. If you tell them that their survival depends on a few key numbers, you can damn well believe that by hook or by crook, those numbers will look good.
Right now, I'm especially grumpy because we are about to start using a product with the god-awful name of "Success Factors." From their website:
Did you know that the average employee spends 50% their time on non-productive work? SuccessFactors plugs this resource drain by making sure your people are working at peak levels of efficiency and effectiveness - 100% of the time.
I call bullshit. The only thing that this tool is going to force is that people will claim that they are 100% effective.
In my experience as a manager and as an employee, I think that the only way to really know the value of an employee is for the manager to have a full understanding of the work done by the employee and enough domain knowledge to appreciate if they are making progress in a reasonable amount of time. This is very difficult, since it requires having good people in management who are also willing to trust their employees.
Unfortunately, that seems a tall order these days...
Keep in mind that part of why Helicos has had such a hard time is that their read lengths suck, especially compared to the 454, which generates comparable throughput for most applications. They were a classic case of a technology that got to the market too late to have a great impact since other technologies had already surpassed them.
Is there not some form of error-correction in the sequence itself that could be exploited ?
Well, not really. The good news, though, is that it isn't a problem.
In nature, error correction works through the fact that during DNA replication, there is always a "mother" strand and a "daughter" strand. As the DNA sits in a cell, methyl groups are added to the backbone of the DNA, which guarantees that both of the mother strands are methylated. (Don't worry about the details here - just think of this is a boolean variable tagged on each strand.)
If an error occurs during replication, the DNA double helix will be disrupted and this abnormal secondary structure is detected by the repair mechanisms in the cell, which chew out the bases from the new strand (using the methyl group tags to identify which is which), and re-synthesize it.
When trying to sequence in the lab, each particular read occurs only once and there is no way to be completely sure that there are no errors. The exact nature of these errors varies wildly across different sequencing technologies, and I'm not even going to try to be exhaustive in describing all of them. In the end, though, it doesn't matter, since when anyone is trying to sequence an organism, they don't sample each region only once. Instead, sequence is only considered to be accurate once it has 5-10X coverage of reads for the same region. (Reading from different molecules from the same part of the genome from different cells.)
Because of this redundancy, the final sequence tends to be very accurate, regardless of the technology used to generate it. The noisier the technology, the higher the coverage needed for the same level of accuracy. In the end, it all comes down to cost - how much are people willing to pay for what accuracy of how much coverage.
The really great thing about what Pacific Biosciences is doing with this new technology is that the time and costs are dropping to be so low that it will no longer be an issue. That is, assuming that they can make it work as well as the papers claim in a reliable manner. If so, a lot of biotech companies (including the one I work for) will be out of business. Much of biotech is centered around finding quick, cheap ways to get at the information, but if you can suddenly get a whole genome sequence for the same time and cost, many of these older technologies will become obsolete, almost overnight.
The flip side for someone with computer skills, though, is that will this sudden surge of data, there is going to be a huge need for people with the ability to make sense of it all.
I'm feeling very ambivalent about this study. Sure, walking down a busy street requires concentration. And? If you look at it this way, it's actively improving your concentration.
Your arguments reeks of truthiness but turns out to not be true. It turns out that relaxing your mind and focusing on single tasks promotes good health and positive mood.
This has been scientifically demonstrated (The quick summary of the above link, for those too lazy to dig through the reference is that researchers found that a group of people receiving some mindfullness mediation training showed improvements in mood and in immune response compared to a control group.)
If I may spin the article in this context, it seems that having a quiet mind is a very, very good thing, and that quiet, natural settings are more conducive to quiet minds that busy urban environments.
Or shared cubicles. Or cubicles where you can hear EVERYTHING your coworkers are doing. Or the noise of dozens or hundreds of PCs.
I read this article two people were having a conference call with a speakerphone about 8 feet from me. It sucked, and I could barely focus on this article, let alone the technical article that I need to read and understand to do my job.
I hardly see why this is a tough idea or a difficult challenge.
Yes, everyone, we all know that coming with one method that can be guaranteed to find ALL crime is a ridiculous idea. And yes, if the incriminating data is all encrypted, they're screwed. That doesn't mean that the request is unreasonable or that it is impossible to make something to help.
What they are asking for, though, is something to make it simple for an average cop with little computer training to assess the contents of a computer to see if there is incriminating evidence. Naturally, the specifics on what this tool will do depends on what crime they are looking for, but I could easily imagine that software packages tailored for specific questions could be pre-installed on USB thumb drives or CDs, allowing the cops to plug them into the computer and run quick scans.
Looking for credit card fraud? Look through through files accessed recently for long lists of numbers that seem credit card numbers.
Looking for kiddie porn? Find all image files, do some quick image processing to reject a lot of images, then display the rest on screen as thumbnails that can be easily scrolled through.
Will these tools find evidence for the super computer-savy experts with all their data encrypted on thumb drives hidden in the floorboards? No, of course not. Will these tools make mistakes? Definitely. Could it still be a very valuable tool to help the cops decide whether to confiscate the computers and help them make more intelligent decisions? Absolutely.
Although the examples you state are fair, be careful about adopting too strongly the notion of natural implying healthy. Mother nature has spent an enormous amount of energy inventing things that are horrible for you.
I shudder even at the thought of smoking joints rolled from poison ivy leaves, but such a thing would be perfectly natural. Similarly, imagine shooting up with rattlesnake venom.
Do they have MRIs of people while they are experiencing a hallucination like this? Something to show the brain is dreaming, and not simply observing?
No, they don't, and they don't need to. Ghosts, spirits, etc. are not supported by a single sliver of hard evidence or any widely accepted scientific theory.
They no more need to show that these aren't real ghosts than they need to show that they aren't video projections made by miniature aliens that are fucking with the bereaved.
Although your stories are very compelling, I'm afraid that I don't place much weight behind them. Why? Simply put, memory sucks, and is easily distorted.
The mysterious ghostly woman seen by both of you? Could it have been the light from a car's headlights? What about someone walking with a flashlight? As for the other woman, that could easily be explained by daydreaming.
One incident from my childhood comes to mind.
There was an empty house down the road from us, and my brother and I used to scare family and friends into thinking there were ghosts living in it. It was incredibly easy to feign fright over some imagined shadow, run away quickly, and then later get the mark to describe the ghoul in detail. My brother also managed to get some of his friends to start getting "signals" from their own houses.
Naturally, I wasn't there when your memories were formed, but I encourage you to treat them with great skepticism. To quote the bard, " Such tricks hath strong imagination,/ That if it would but apprehend some joy,/ It comprehends some bringer of that joy;/ Or in the night, imagining some fear,/ How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"
There is a lot about the physical world that we not only have never investigated, but never expected or suspected.
Incidentally, this is something that I absolutely agree with. The idea that we already understand everything is naive to the point of laughable. At the same time, though, just because we don't understand everything, that doesn't mean we should accept everything.
The trouble with tales such as yours is that although they are compelling, they are inherently unreproducible and in conflict with all "normal" understandings of the world.
Yeah, that's one thing that always bugs me - the irrational fear that things are covered with bacteria.
I got news for you - everything is always coated with bacteria, unless it just came out of an autoclave, in which case it is coated with dead bacteria. This is why we have immune systems and why those without immune systems will die almost immediately.
Are you worried about fecal matter on your toothbrush from "splashing" from flushing? Try worrying about shit up your nose every time you smell a fart. Try thinking about all the bacteria stuck to those plastic menu covers in restaurants and how everybody handles them, then reaches for the bowl of tortilla chips.
Certainly, good hygiene can help keep the bacterial loads to a minimum, which is a good idea. Just don't overdue it and freak out.
Oh, and urine - that's one of the cleanest bodily fluids around. Unless you have an infection, urine is sterile and safe to drink. Disgusting, yes, and not a very healthy drink (lots of salts and things your body is trying to get rid off), but safe from an infectious disease standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, there isn't enough veggie oil to completely replace gas. It is a great idea (I'm even on the board of directors of a small bio-fuel co-op that sells veggie oil at a pump), but it will always be a niche market that is only part of a broader energy solution.
You're modded as funny, but I'm not sure if that was your intent or not.
Companies evolve and survive. Nokia has been around since the 1800's, long before anyone ever heard of a cell phone.
Or, in the words of Dr. Strangelove, "Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the FEAR to attack."
With an attitude like that, how do you expect them to defend their drug testing policies?
Too true.
Recently at work, we had a round of performance reviews, and apparently the VP of HR has been routinely overriding individual managers' reviews of the people they supervise, even though the VP has no first-hand experience working with any of these people.
I'm starting to wonder if the idea of encouraging hard work through good morale and mutual respect has completely died.
No, the sloppy thinking is clear - we need to blame the Amish.
Nice try, but that would imply that somehow parents bear some form of responsibility, which is unthinkable.
Clearly, the evil corporation did it, because someone (else) has to be blamed, right?
While we're at it, should we get off your lawn?
A good friend of mine is a public school teacher, and as his own daughter is about to start school, he's considering home-schooling.
Why?
Simply put - he wants her to learn and to be excited about learning. He recently watched a previously home-schooled girl enter high school brimming with questions. She asked all sorts of things, eager to learn. Then, after a few weeks, the questions stopped.
Apparently, her parents were interested in education and instilled in her a spirit to learn. The trouble is that by the time kids reach high school, they don't give a rat's ass about learning and education and those who do are stigmatized.
And no, I don't have any solutions. I suggest talk to teachers, then ignoring what 90% of them say.
The real problem is that logic and reason have very little to due with fundamentalist beliefs for any religion.
(Emphasis here on fundamentalist beliefs.)
I agree whole-heartedly. She made a simple, honest mistake that could be made by anyone with little knowledge of computers.
The real trouble, that I don't expect hear voiced very well on slashdot, is the tech support person at Dell. When she called to try to switch her OS, that person had no business talking her out of it. She was not open to trying Ubuntu. She was not interested in anything other than Windows. Talking her into keeping something she didn't want was reckless and irresponsible and does more to hurt the cause of FOSS than to help it.
You want to encourage people to use Linux? Great - do so with one-on-one discussions and careful mentoring.
STOP FORCING IT ONTO PEOPLE WHO DON'T WANT IT!
*ahem*
Consider this the post-modern, performance art way of proving my point.
Keep in mind that part of why Helicos has had such a hard time is that their read lengths suck, especially compared to the 454, which generates comparable throughput for most applications. They were a classic case of a technology that got to the market too late to have a great impact since other technologies had already surpassed them.
Well, not really. The good news, though, is that it isn't a problem.
In nature, error correction works through the fact that during DNA replication, there is always a "mother" strand and a "daughter" strand. As the DNA sits in a cell, methyl groups are added to the backbone of the DNA, which guarantees that both of the mother strands are methylated. (Don't worry about the details here - just think of this is a boolean variable tagged on each strand.)
If an error occurs during replication, the DNA double helix will be disrupted and this abnormal secondary structure is detected by the repair mechanisms in the cell, which chew out the bases from the new strand (using the methyl group tags to identify which is which), and re-synthesize it.
When trying to sequence in the lab, each particular read occurs only once and there is no way to be completely sure that there are no errors. The exact nature of these errors varies wildly across different sequencing technologies, and I'm not even going to try to be exhaustive in describing all of them. In the end, though, it doesn't matter, since when anyone is trying to sequence an organism, they don't sample each region only once. Instead, sequence is only considered to be accurate once it has 5-10X coverage of reads for the same region. (Reading from different molecules from the same part of the genome from different cells.)
Because of this redundancy, the final sequence tends to be very accurate, regardless of the technology used to generate it. The noisier the technology, the higher the coverage needed for the same level of accuracy. In the end, it all comes down to cost - how much are people willing to pay for what accuracy of how much coverage.
The really great thing about what Pacific Biosciences is doing with this new technology is that the time and costs are dropping to be so low that it will no longer be an issue. That is, assuming that they can make it work as well as the papers claim in a reliable manner. If so, a lot of biotech companies (including the one I work for) will be out of business. Much of biotech is centered around finding quick, cheap ways to get at the information, but if you can suddenly get a whole genome sequence for the same time and cost, many of these older technologies will become obsolete, almost overnight.
The flip side for someone with computer skills, though, is that will this sudden surge of data, there is going to be a huge need for people with the ability to make sense of it all.
Your arguments reeks of truthiness but turns out to not be true. It turns out that relaxing your mind and focusing on single tasks promotes good health and positive mood.
This has been scientifically demonstrated (The quick summary of the above link, for those too lazy to dig through the reference is that researchers found that a group of people receiving some mindfullness mediation training showed improvements in mood and in immune response compared to a control group.)
If I may spin the article in this context, it seems that having a quiet mind is a very, very good thing, and that quiet, natural settings are more conducive to quiet minds that busy urban environments.
I read this article two people were having a conference call with a speakerphone about 8 feet from me. It sucked, and I could barely focus on this article, let alone the technical article that I need to read and understand to do my job.
Distractions are bad.
I hardly see why this is a tough idea or a difficult challenge.
Yes, everyone, we all know that coming with one method that can be guaranteed to find ALL crime is a ridiculous idea. And yes, if the incriminating data is all encrypted, they're screwed. That doesn't mean that the request is unreasonable or that it is impossible to make something to help.
What they are asking for, though, is something to make it simple for an average cop with little computer training to assess the contents of a computer to see if there is incriminating evidence. Naturally, the specifics on what this tool will do depends on what crime they are looking for, but I could easily imagine that software packages tailored for specific questions could be pre-installed on USB thumb drives or CDs, allowing the cops to plug them into the computer and run quick scans.
Looking for credit card fraud? Look through through files accessed recently for long lists of numbers that seem credit card numbers.
Looking for kiddie porn? Find all image files, do some quick image processing to reject a lot of images, then display the rest on screen as thumbnails that can be easily scrolled through.
Will these tools find evidence for the super computer-savy experts with all their data encrypted on thumb drives hidden in the floorboards? No, of course not. Will these tools make mistakes? Definitely. Could it still be a very valuable tool to help the cops decide whether to confiscate the computers and help them make more intelligent decisions? Absolutely.
Painful and All Natural(tm).
I agree completely. Now who are we going to find to teach the teachers how to use computers correctly?
Although the examples you state are fair, be careful about adopting too strongly the notion of natural implying healthy. Mother nature has spent an enormous amount of energy inventing things that are horrible for you.
I shudder even at the thought of smoking joints rolled from poison ivy leaves, but such a thing would be perfectly natural. Similarly, imagine shooting up with rattlesnake venom.
No, they don't, and they don't need to. Ghosts, spirits, etc. are not supported by a single sliver of hard evidence or any widely accepted scientific theory.
They no more need to show that these aren't real ghosts than they need to show that they aren't video projections made by miniature aliens that are fucking with the bereaved.
Although your stories are very compelling, I'm afraid that I don't place much weight behind them. Why? Simply put, memory sucks, and is easily distorted.
The mysterious ghostly woman seen by both of you? Could it have been the light from a car's headlights? What about someone walking with a flashlight? As for the other woman, that could easily be explained by daydreaming.
One incident from my childhood comes to mind.
There was an empty house down the road from us, and my brother and I used to scare family and friends into thinking there were ghosts living in it. It was incredibly easy to feign fright over some imagined shadow, run away quickly, and then later get the mark to describe the ghoul in detail. My brother also managed to get some of his friends to start getting "signals" from their own houses.
Naturally, I wasn't there when your memories were formed, but I encourage you to treat them with great skepticism. To quote the bard, " Such tricks hath strong imagination,/ That if it would but apprehend some joy,/ It comprehends some bringer of that joy;/ Or in the night, imagining some fear,/ How easy is a bush supposed a bear!"
Incidentally, this is something that I absolutely agree with. The idea that we already understand everything is naive to the point of laughable. At the same time, though, just because we don't understand everything, that doesn't mean we should accept everything.
The trouble with tales such as yours is that although they are compelling, they are inherently unreproducible and in conflict with all "normal" understandings of the world.
No carbonation.
Yeah, that's one thing that always bugs me - the irrational fear that things are covered with bacteria.
I got news for you - everything is always coated with bacteria, unless it just came out of an autoclave, in which case it is coated with dead bacteria. This is why we have immune systems and why those without immune systems will die almost immediately.
Are you worried about fecal matter on your toothbrush from "splashing" from flushing? Try worrying about shit up your nose every time you smell a fart. Try thinking about all the bacteria stuck to those plastic menu covers in restaurants and how everybody handles them, then reaches for the bowl of tortilla chips.
Certainly, good hygiene can help keep the bacterial loads to a minimum, which is a good idea. Just don't overdue it and freak out.
Oh, and urine - that's one of the cleanest bodily fluids around. Unless you have an infection, urine is sterile and safe to drink. Disgusting, yes, and not a very healthy drink (lots of salts and things your body is trying to get rid off), but safe from an infectious disease standpoint.