by your logic rape and murder should be perfectly ethically acceptable because that's how we evolved: the strongest male kills the other competing males and mates with every female in sight. For most vegetarians it's not as much about whether what we eat has brains and emotions but whether we do and whether we choose to use them.
True, although you could always design a nice "virtual bookshelf" type of interface for browsing titles in software. In fact, most library catalog search engines will show "other titles on the same shelf" by default. For example see this entry for Dune and click on "Browse shelf" to the right of the page.
Indeed the long run the robotic library will be cheaper. My alma mater started construction on one just before I graduated and I heard a librarian talking about the new design. Robotic libraries allow a higher packing density (more books per cubic meter), save on climate control (no need to compensate for opening / closing doors, it's underground so well insulated, no windows), require far fewer lights (robots can work in the dark), reduce the number of employees needed to staff the place (a + or - depending on your point of view) among many other long-term cost-savings.
The link to the atmospheric radiation monitoring data is quite encouraging. 3 sites reported measurements comparable to roughly 3 hours of jet travel per hour on the ground and the rest are mostly at or near background.
"The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell," Lahey said. "I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards."
Cancer might resemble the kind of cells that eventually made the transition of prokaryotes to eukaryotes.
A cancer cell is a cell that has no regulated growth control, in that fashion it resembles all single-celled life- prokaryote or eukaryote, but that's where the resemblance ends. Cancer is not some exotic type of cell, it's quite simply a cell which lost or broke one or more communication pathways that allow the cell itself or other cells in a multicellular organism to direct its growth and differentiation. No theory surrounding the evolution of eukaryotic cells has anything to do with the reason cancer cells are cancerous.
The good news is this means cancers have only finite variation. Once we figure out the ancient genes, we'll know how it works. It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought.
We've already figured out how most cancer works. At a gross, generalized level you have oncogenes (genes responsible for driving growth) and tumor suppressor genes (genes responsible for regulating growth) when interrelated genes of both varieties break in a cell, it becomes a cancer. A detailed molecular understanding of how some cancers work have led to effective treatments (see: Imatinib, Tamoxifen and Raloxifene) but that's hardly been successfully translated to other cancers where the broken parts aren't as easily modulated. In fact, Raloxifene was developed specifically because Tamoxifen which inhibits an oncogene in breast tissue activated the same oncogene in uterine tissue. What 10 years of the human genome have taught us is that not all diseases are direct or simple breaks in genetic code and that not all diseases with known, simple breaks in the genetic code are as easily treatable as we might like.
The only catch in this particular case is that the cell culture methodology used requires the addition of animal serum to the media, otherwise the myoblasts (which are not pluripotent stem cells and cannot divide indefinitely, therefore needing to be freshly generated somehow) would not have the growth factors necessary to drive cell division (since they're not cancer cells, they don't produce enough growth factors on their own to be able to grow spontaneously). Developing a completely synthetic or plant-derived route to culturing these cells would also not be a trivial task since the reason sera are used in culturing mammalian cells is that we don't fully understand all of the growth factors present and what purpose they serve.
by what measure? In purely social and economic terms, I would argue that the exact inverse of your title is true: the more efficient a market is the closer prices will be to the marginal cost of a product. In the case of a tool / platform like a smartphone, this means that the greatest possible number of consumers will have access to valuable resource and therefore the high volume low margin product has the potential to generate significantly greater economic activity and social benefit than the low volume high margin luxury player in the marketplace. That's not to say that profit doesn't have value from certain perspectives, but from the consumer's standpoint it's all about maximum access and minimum profit to the manufacturer.
Re:some things ... can't be predicted ...like clim
on
Bastardi's Wager
·
· Score: 2
That means that, mathematically speaking, AGW could be 100% accurate today, and that still doesn't give you one iota of predictability. Weather, and long term climate could still become totally unresponsive to CO2 overnight. More specifically in a given chaotic system *any* prediction (within certain limits) *will* happen, just not known when.
In a chaotic dataset, there is *no* way to predict the future, no matter the amount and accuracy of the available data, nor can the quality of the system help you (except - if you're God and know *everything*. By that we mean the position of every last atom, photon and neutrino in the universe. This is often joked about - if a person can't give the lotto outcomes for the next 100 years, he can't give you the weather -or climate- in 100 years either.
A subtle but important distinction, but chaotic systems are ones in which if you did know the position of every last atom, photon and neutrino in the universe you could predict the system's behavior, the basic problem is that we can't and small deviations in any of the initial conditions will produce drastically different outcomes. Chaotic systems are deterministic by definition but hypersensitive to their initial conditions. From wiki:
This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.
What this means is that while accurate long-term predictions are impossible, it is possible to analyze trends to some degree of accuracy. You can perform sensitivity analyses looking at how alterations in some parameters ultimately influence the trajectory of the entire system. I think this is a pretty sensible way of going about it and the interpretations presented under this light are a great deal more accurate and enlightening than global temperature projections. The most reliable thing we can say so far is that all long-term models show that increasing CO2 will likely cause increasing mean temperature in the long run and more extreme weather in the short term.
Indeed, the positrons are not escaping into space, even at an altitude of 100km, the mean free path in atmosphere is on the order of cm. TFA has it right although slightly distorted (the summary is totally off). The generation of the positron / electron pair results in an annihilation event quite rapidly as the positron travels away from its generation point. What is being observed in orbit is the 511.4 keV photon (gamma ray) that is generated as a consequence of the annihilation. Hence why a gamma ray observatory was able to detect the events.
also volume, volume and volume. It's what makes it possible for Apple to do all of their own custom ASICs, reducing size, complexity, manufacturing costs and power consumption dramatically.
Scale is also an important factor. With better statistical methodology, more rigorous epidemiology and a growing usage of bio-statisticians in the interpretation of results, we're seeing that weak associations that were once considered significant cannot be replicated in larger experiments with more subjects, more quantitative and accurate measurements. Unlike many, many other fields (particularly theology) when scientific theories are overturned, it is a success of the methodology itself.
That's not to say that individual scientists don't sometimes dislike the outcome and ultimately attempt to ignore and/or discredit the counter-evidence, but in the long run this can never work since hard data cannot be hand-waved away forever.
Interesting, I hadn't looked at the bug reports (RTC[omplete]FA, doh!). That certainly looks like a major bug, although the irregularity (one submitter reported owning two Nexus S with the same build but only seeing the bug on one) of it is extremely curious.
There appear to be a few failure modes; the one we definitely experience on the Gingerbread-powered Nexus S involves being routed to the wrong thread when you tap it either in the Notifications list or the master thread list in the Messaging application, so if you don't notice, you'll end up firing a message to the wrong person.
Not sure whether to file this under FUD, but the error isn't nearly as sensational as the title or summary seem to indicate. Certainly an issue if it turns out that presses are being fuzzed out to different locations than intended, but very possibly an issue of "fat fingers" on the part of customers. Either way, the Android team should take a look at it and either fix the touch firmware or increase the size individual entries in the notifications screen (make it adjustable?) to prevent miss-taps. The summary definitely makes it seem that the text subsystem is just shooting them to random contacts without the user knowing which is far from what's actually happening.
Amazon, actually. D.light is one of the smaller manufacturers in terms of the size of their systems. The larger systems on the market are a bit harder to find in the developed world.
This stuff represents one of the smartest applications of solar power- too expensive to justify at power-plant scales, yet the infrastructure-free nature of panels makes them ideal for distributed generation where the grid doesn't reach.
To add to your point- every vaccine produced in the past 20 years has made use of government-funded university research, roughly half of all AIDS drugs were discovered at universities, heck even the initial work on the plasma screen TV (a multi-billion-dollar-per-year product line) was done at a university.
There's an even more robust option- members of the public can file requests with the PTO to review patents it has granted. If we can present a "preponderance of evidence" that the patent should not have been granted, it will be revoked. It's worth noting that 90% of such requests are successful.
There was a humorous TED talk on this over 2 years ago following quite a bit of media coverage on the same topic. I believe its also been explored whether internal diaper temperatures may do long term harm the development of the testes.
"The product of mental labor — science — always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production." - Karl Marx
Unfortunately, no. Perforin acts by breaching the cell membrane of invading bacteria or parasites, viruses are too small and lack the membrane and internal structure for such an approach to work. Most often, immune cells fight viral infections instead by engulfing as many viral particles as possible and self destructing. Unfortunately HIV undermines critical elements of the immune system itself by selectively depleting naive helper T-cells rendering the immune system unable to respond to any new infection, much less the HIV infection itself.
The lead lawyer on the case, Dan Ravicher, self identifies as a radical conservative who believes that when government isn't incompetent it's corrupt. There are some fundamental issues that people at every end of the political spectrum can agree on.
Interestingly enough the first patents on this came from the University of Utah, Myriad is a licensee. That a public university receiving federal funding to support this research with a mandate to further scientific knowledge for the public benefit would pursue patents on such a fundamental discovery is itself a separate series of issues. Groups like Universities Allied for Essential Medicine have been fighting from the academic side to ensure that Universities license technology responsibly and include terms in the license to guarantee that companies make the commercialized products as widely available as possible. This includes license terms like exemptions for non-profit and government institutions using the claimed technology for research- a right you would expect Universities to fight tooth and nail to preserve but sadly they often don't out of fear of turning off potential licensees. This is particularly true in a recession when every royalty dollar makes a huge impact.
Slashdot Mirror
by your logic rape and murder should be perfectly ethically acceptable because that's how we evolved: the strongest male kills the other competing males and mates with every female in sight. For most vegetarians it's not as much about whether what we eat has brains and emotions but whether we do and whether we choose to use them.
True, although you could always design a nice "virtual bookshelf" type of interface for browsing titles in software. In fact, most library catalog search engines will show "other titles on the same shelf" by default. For example see this entry for Dune and click on "Browse shelf" to the right of the page.
Indeed the long run the robotic library will be cheaper. My alma mater started construction on one just before I graduated and I heard a librarian talking about the new design. Robotic libraries allow a higher packing density (more books per cubic meter), save on climate control (no need to compensate for opening / closing doors, it's underground so well insulated, no windows), require far fewer lights (robots can work in the dark), reduce the number of employees needed to staff the place (a + or - depending on your point of view) among many other long-term cost-savings.
Exactly! If federal subsidies for beef and dairy were removed consumers would actually face the true cost of raising cattle. In fact if subsidies matched more closely with the dietary needs of humans, we might see a real revolution in public health in the US.
The link to the atmospheric radiation monitoring data is quite encouraging. 3 sites reported measurements comparable to roughly 3 hours of jet travel per hour on the ground and the rest are mostly at or near background.
"The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell," Lahey said. "I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards."
'nuff said.
Cancer might resemble the kind of cells that eventually made the transition of prokaryotes to eukaryotes.
A cancer cell is a cell that has no regulated growth control, in that fashion it resembles all single-celled life- prokaryote or eukaryote, but that's where the resemblance ends. Cancer is not some exotic type of cell, it's quite simply a cell which lost or broke one or more communication pathways that allow the cell itself or other cells in a multicellular organism to direct its growth and differentiation. No theory surrounding the evolution of eukaryotic cells has anything to do with the reason cancer cells are cancerous.
The good news is this means cancers have only finite variation. Once we figure out the ancient genes, we'll know how it works. It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought.
We've already figured out how most cancer works. At a gross, generalized level you have oncogenes (genes responsible for driving growth) and tumor suppressor genes (genes responsible for regulating growth) when interrelated genes of both varieties break in a cell, it becomes a cancer. A detailed molecular understanding of how some cancers work have led to effective treatments (see: Imatinib, Tamoxifen and Raloxifene) but that's hardly been successfully translated to other cancers where the broken parts aren't as easily modulated. In fact, Raloxifene was developed specifically because Tamoxifen which inhibits an oncogene in breast tissue activated the same oncogene in uterine tissue. What 10 years of the human genome have taught us is that not all diseases are direct or simple breaks in genetic code and that not all diseases with known, simple breaks in the genetic code are as easily treatable as we might like.
The only catch in this particular case is that the cell culture methodology used requires the addition of animal serum to the media, otherwise the myoblasts (which are not pluripotent stem cells and cannot divide indefinitely, therefore needing to be freshly generated somehow) would not have the growth factors necessary to drive cell division (since they're not cancer cells, they don't produce enough growth factors on their own to be able to grow spontaneously). Developing a completely synthetic or plant-derived route to culturing these cells would also not be a trivial task since the reason sera are used in culturing mammalian cells is that we don't fully understand all of the growth factors present and what purpose they serve.
by what measure? In purely social and economic terms, I would argue that the exact inverse of your title is true: the more efficient a market is the closer prices will be to the marginal cost of a product. In the case of a tool / platform like a smartphone, this means that the greatest possible number of consumers will have access to valuable resource and therefore the high volume low margin product has the potential to generate significantly greater economic activity and social benefit than the low volume high margin luxury player in the marketplace. That's not to say that profit doesn't have value from certain perspectives, but from the consumer's standpoint it's all about maximum access and minimum profit to the manufacturer.
That means that, mathematically speaking, AGW could be 100% accurate today, and that still doesn't give you one iota of predictability. Weather, and long term climate could still become totally unresponsive to CO2 overnight. More specifically in a given chaotic system *any* prediction (within certain limits) *will* happen, just not known when. In a chaotic dataset, there is *no* way to predict the future, no matter the amount and accuracy of the available data, nor can the quality of the system help you (except - if you're God and know *everything*. By that we mean the position of every last atom, photon and neutrino in the universe. This is often joked about - if a person can't give the lotto outcomes for the next 100 years, he can't give you the weather -or climate- in 100 years either.
A subtle but important distinction, but chaotic systems are ones in which if you did know the position of every last atom, photon and neutrino in the universe you could predict the system's behavior, the basic problem is that we can't and small deviations in any of the initial conditions will produce drastically different outcomes. Chaotic systems are deterministic by definition but hypersensitive to their initial conditions. From wiki:
This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.
What this means is that while accurate long-term predictions are impossible, it is possible to analyze trends to some degree of accuracy. You can perform sensitivity analyses looking at how alterations in some parameters ultimately influence the trajectory of the entire system. I think this is a pretty sensible way of going about it and the interpretations presented under this light are a great deal more accurate and enlightening than global temperature projections. The most reliable thing we can say so far is that all long-term models show that increasing CO2 will likely cause increasing mean temperature in the long run and more extreme weather in the short term.
Indeed, the positrons are not escaping into space, even at an altitude of 100km, the mean free path in atmosphere is on the order of cm. TFA has it right although slightly distorted (the summary is totally off). The generation of the positron / electron pair results in an annihilation event quite rapidly as the positron travels away from its generation point. What is being observed in orbit is the 511.4 keV photon (gamma ray) that is generated as a consequence of the annihilation. Hence why a gamma ray observatory was able to detect the events.
also volume, volume and volume. It's what makes it possible for Apple to do all of their own custom ASICs, reducing size, complexity, manufacturing costs and power consumption dramatically.
Scale is also an important factor. With better statistical methodology, more rigorous epidemiology and a growing usage of bio-statisticians in the interpretation of results, we're seeing that weak associations that were once considered significant cannot be replicated in larger experiments with more subjects, more quantitative and accurate measurements. Unlike many, many other fields (particularly theology) when scientific theories are overturned, it is a success of the methodology itself.
That's not to say that individual scientists don't sometimes dislike the outcome and ultimately attempt to ignore and/or discredit the counter-evidence, but in the long run this can never work since hard data cannot be hand-waved away forever.
Interesting, I hadn't looked at the bug reports (RTC[omplete]FA, doh!). That certainly looks like a major bug, although the irregularity (one submitter reported owning two Nexus S with the same build but only seeing the bug on one) of it is extremely curious.
There appear to be a few failure modes; the one we definitely experience on the Gingerbread-powered Nexus S involves being routed to the wrong thread when you tap it either in the Notifications list or the master thread list in the Messaging application, so if you don't notice, you'll end up firing a message to the wrong person.
Not sure whether to file this under FUD, but the error isn't nearly as sensational as the title or summary seem to indicate. Certainly an issue if it turns out that presses are being fuzzed out to different locations than intended, but very possibly an issue of "fat fingers" on the part of customers. Either way, the Android team should take a look at it and either fix the touch firmware or increase the size individual entries in the notifications screen (make it adjustable?) to prevent miss-taps. The summary definitely makes it seem that the text subsystem is just shooting them to random contacts without the user knowing which is far from what's actually happening.
Amazon, actually. D.light is one of the smaller manufacturers in terms of the size of their systems. The larger systems on the market are a bit harder to find in the developed world.
This stuff represents one of the smartest applications of solar power- too expensive to justify at power-plant scales, yet the infrastructure-free nature of panels makes them ideal for distributed generation where the grid doesn't reach.
To add to your point- every vaccine produced in the past 20 years has made use of government-funded university research, roughly half of all AIDS drugs were discovered at universities, heck even the initial work on the plasma screen TV (a multi-billion-dollar-per-year product line) was done at a university.
There's an even more robust option- members of the public can file requests with the PTO to review patents it has granted. If we can present a "preponderance of evidence" that the patent should not have been granted, it will be revoked. It's worth noting that 90% of such requests are successful.
There was a humorous TED talk on this over 2 years ago following quite a bit of media coverage on the same topic. I believe its also been explored whether internal diaper temperatures may do long term harm the development of the testes.
"The product of mental labor — science — always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production." - Karl Marx
Unfortunately, no. Perforin acts by breaching the cell membrane of invading bacteria or parasites, viruses are too small and lack the membrane and internal structure for such an approach to work. Most often, immune cells fight viral infections instead by engulfing as many viral particles as possible and self destructing. Unfortunately HIV undermines critical elements of the immune system itself by selectively depleting naive helper T-cells rendering the immune system unable to respond to any new infection, much less the HIV infection itself.
The lead lawyer on the case, Dan Ravicher, self identifies as a radical conservative who believes that when government isn't incompetent it's corrupt. There are some fundamental issues that people at every end of the political spectrum can agree on.
Interestingly enough the first patents on this came from the University of Utah, Myriad is a licensee. That a public university receiving federal funding to support this research with a mandate to further scientific knowledge for the public benefit would pursue patents on such a fundamental discovery is itself a separate series of issues. Groups like Universities Allied for Essential Medicine have been fighting from the academic side to ensure that Universities license technology responsibly and include terms in the license to guarantee that companies make the commercialized products as widely available as possible. This includes license terms like exemptions for non-profit and government institutions using the claimed technology for research- a right you would expect Universities to fight tooth and nail to preserve but sadly they often don't out of fear of turning off potential licensees. This is particularly true in a recession when every royalty dollar makes a huge impact.