Seem to be accepted fine with a 90% success rate. I've always noticed that whenever most people that don't use one every day pick up an iTouch/iPhone, for example, the error rate in typing and gestures can be even higher than 10% yet this does not deter people because the basic functionality like scrolling and "clicking" work fine. In my experience, people are willing to chalk up errors in slightly more involved gestures to "getting used" to the particular touchscreen's properties. I know several people running various 7 beta/RC builds on their tablets full-time and are absolutely in love with it. I'm considering getting a Lenovo X200 tablet later this year and I look forward to being able to try out 7 on it.
Seconded! If you're ok with doing some coding but want a very technically interesting line of work, take some classes in bioinformatics or, better yet, systems biology if you have the math background (typically at least one semester of differential equations and possibly some linear systems). You could easily get a job as running a lab's high-performance computing requirements. If you're interested in further studies down the road, that kind of work experience positions you very well for a masters or doctoral program in a multidisciplinary field of study. If taking those classes isn't an option for you, find a faculty member that does that kind of work (look in CS, EE , bioengineering/biomedical engineering department, biochem, microbio, or bio for faculty) and get into their lab. Most of these guys will do anything they can to get someone with a CS background and you'll almost certainly be able to get full-time work with that lab or many others like it once you graduate.
I guess there's two ways to slice it: software development versus algorithms. I think it would be very easy (and in fact quite beneficial) for algorithm development to be integrated into existing math and science classes. Something like VPython could be a tremendous aid in helping physics students visualize vectors and how mechanics and EM problems "look". While the ability to compute (not only does it help you solve the problem, it helps you understand the nature of the problem as well!) is just as critical as the underlying problems it helps you solve (core sciences, math, etc), skills that are more commonly thought of as "software engineering" definitely belong in specialty classes and electives.
Even if your point were valid, the microscope works, this gadget doesn't. You can reliably detect things like tuberculosis and malaria using a microscope, and if its a fluorescence model you could even do CD4+ T-cell counts manually. This cell-phone doohicky is incapable of all of those, or even of anything remotely medically relevant. As for your point, though, the w810i that they used in their contraption has a list price of about $200, still without managing to deal with the little problem that it.doesn't.work.
To elaborate on the inadequacy of this technique for malaria diagnostics, for example, the Poisson statistics indicate that a reliable diagnosis requires the analysis of about 2 microliters of blood. Now this doesn't seem like much except that 2 microliters of blood contains 10-14 million red blood cells. In order to just have all of those cells on the sensor while able to discriminate between adjacent cells that means you'd need at least a 90-megapixel camera on which to smear your blood sample. Now if you wanted to reliably detect a malaria infection, you would obviously need a lot more than 1 pixel per cell so the magnitude of the problem increases exponentially from there.
It may work, but its completely useless from a diagnostics standpoint. Knowing the size of a cell is useless, especially with the resolution and sensitivity a cell phone camera could provide. Past publications from this lab show no reliable size discrimination below 15 microns, so even if it were useful information, it would be useless for human cell samples of which nearly all interesting species are smaller than or border this threshold. Sub-cellular resolution might help you do something like malaria diagnostics, but the amount of sample that needs to be analyzed and the magnification level you would need to be able to discriminate the plasmodium within a red blood cell are so high that, surprise, you're so much better off using a $100 microscope.
A. It can't detect HIV. No imaging technology short of electron microscopy can directly detect the virus itself and even electron microscope would be a retarded way to attempt diagnostics.
Even the original paper describing this technology showed that they have no sub-cellular resolution and even their size resolution was extremely unreliable for anything smaller than 15 microns... which all interesting human cells are (even if you could tell what size cells are you've accomplished.... nothing).
If they are suggesting they can do CD4+ T-lymphocyte counts they're either idiots, ignorant or both. There is no morphological distinction between a CD4+ and a CD4- T-lymphocyte. Even using fluorescence imaging (which they aren't) you have to be able to look at two colors of fluorescence (CD3 label to check to see if its a lymphocyte and a CD4 label to see if its CD4+) immunofluorescence is way too weak to be detected by a cell phone camera, especially a color sensor with 2 micron pixels. The CD4 antigen is never expressed at levels greater than approximately 50,000 / cell, the detection limit of a 5 micron pixel monochrome sensor (the bayer mask makes you lose about 30% of your light) is close to about 150,000 molecules. The bayer mask also makes your sensor pretty much useless for analytical applications, you're screwed if your green-fluorescent cell is centered over a red or blue-sensitive pixel which would happen in, oh, 66% of your pixels.
You run into almost identical sets of problems with every other so-called "application" of this "technology" so, yeah, bullshit.
You mean tough for human survival in Europe, Africa and the middle east. The Library's loss certainly didn't affect the civilizations of the Indian subcontinent and the Americas. Like the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen says, the philosophers of south-east Asia were asking questions the western world has only recently begun to ask itself while Europe was still in the dark ages.
Don't hold your breath. While the chip itself might be cheap to manufacture, its going to run into the same problems that have plagued immunochromatographic diagnostic technologies for years:
1. Antibodies are extremely expensive relative to other reagents that can be used (acid fast staining for mycobacteria, nucleic acid stains for plasmodia and other parasites, etc). 2. Its impossible to get a measure of the "confidence" of a measurement using this type of technology, so verifying results requires performing a completely different diagnostic test. But if you have no idea which tests gave confident results and which did not, how do you know which results to verify? 3. Cell-phone cameras are useless for quantitative analysis, especially ones that would need high dynamic range and high accuracy 4. Quality control and assurance is a bitch. Ask any epidemiologist that has experience working with malaria RDTs in the field. Some of them last 6 months, some last 1 month on the shelf. 5. In high-burden areas for certain diseases, using a disposable test methodology becomes extremely cost-ineffective.
While this might be interesting for things like simple urine tests or blood sugar tests, diagnosing infectious diseases represents a massive challenge for technologies like this. There's a reason we still use century-old microscopy-based technologies for diagnosing things like active TB and malaria even though they suck. I don't blame the researchers, they do good work and aren't focused on building a real product. Its the journalists that somehow make the leap between "we can detect glucose" and "revolutionary diagnostic technology."
to hear from someone with a bit more understanding of the reason the builds posted for MID are specific to Menlow and McCaslin and whether / why these builds would or wouldn't work on more generic intel hardware such as present in the current eeePCs not to mention how difficult would it be to get it to run properly (just install the generic i386 kernel?).
I feel that Isaac Asimov once put it best:
"Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too."
-Isaac Asimov
At my university, we had a student body president who, in order to draw attention to the farce that was our student government ran as "The Pirate Captain." So screw you ninja!
While I tend to agree that Ubuntu (and many other distros!) have come a long way in terms of casual desktop user friendliness, its not going to push Linux into the mainstream. I may use it, many of my friends may use it, but until it becomes commercially mass-marketed Linux isnt going to be able to really gain traction in the sense that windows and even osx have. Offerings like Dell's definitely help, even the exposure Linux-based OS's such as the one on the eeePC will help to bring greater awareness, but as I'm sure many of you are aware, a great product great technology does not necessarily make.
I go to a pretty large tech school, the college of engineering is the largest college on campus by far and I think how much fun it is relative to a liberal arts school really depends on your more than some arbitrary rule that liberal arts schools are more fun. Just because the school is technical does NOT mean there won't be women, you might just have to go outside of your department's building to find them! Being a CS major or any other technical degree does not instantaneously turn you into a geek, chances are you might be but if thats the case you're probably going to have a lot more fun at a tech school where you'll get opportunities to interact with more people that have similar interests, You'll have the opportunity to get involved with student groups that may be entering into robotics or software competitions, you'll have access to more faculty in more departments in which you can get involved with undergraduate research. If none of these really interest you, then definitely, go to the liberal arts school, but shame on you slashdot for telling the poor kid that technical schools cant be as, or more, fun than a liberal arts school.
I call FUD. I installed Vista Business on my laptop when it became available over the MSDNAA to try it out. Install took two hours, was painless. I've installed XP and 2000 pro from scratch on an old Dell I upgraded numerous times before and the installer has never so much as squeaked at me. It can can be an absolute pain- but rarely, rarely ever is.
The problem isn't that its a waste, the problem is that nobody has seriously taken the long-term risk of trying. And when it doesn't work, trying again and again and again. It took 22 years of trying before a successful colony was set up on N. America. If NASA had made real attempts following the Apollo missions to establish a foothold, it could have easily set up a stable presence in 22 years, the problem is that they didn't. In fact nobody has really tried. ever. We have all the technology we need, we have the capabilities to make things dramatically cheaper (watch the last few minutes of this). We just haven't tried! What humanity needs right now is a repeat of what drove the first European colonization of the western hemisphere- someone to put up the cash and someone to risk their life(ves) to get there and try to stay there. Damnit, we should have been there 40 years ago.
I don't think he necessarily meant that the operating systems themselves would become irrelevant so much as the user experiences tied to them. Having just come back from a student group that was given the opportunity speak with a lot of execs and engineers out in the Valley, I can definitely sense that the focus has shifted from the desktop experience to the internet experience- to such an extent that inspiration has begun to bleed from one into the other. We're seeing this especially with mobile devices which seek to separate the Desktop and the Internet- the iPhone, as much as I am not a fan, and the iPod Touch have done this beautifully, the SideKick/Hiptop have done it almost as well, if not better (IMHO), The Nokia N8** and the eeePC have tried to skirt on opposite sides of a middle path and have been pretty successful at it.
The Next Big Thing(tm) won't be the next Windows, the next release of Ubuntu nor the next OS X or OS XI, its going to be a platform capable of delivering the look and feel of the web experience that you see on all of these mobile internet-centric devices on laptop and desktop platforms. The File Manager, the Application Window and Desktop will likely not disappear, but a fundamental change is coming to the world of Personal Computing and the result will not be recognizable as the Win/OSX/Linux OS's of today. (Disclaimer: to the End User anyways)
IBM is still the single largest patent holding entity in the US. The article is a bit old, but its still valid today. While I can sympathize with your concern as I believe the US patent system is in SEVERE need of a rethinking, IBM has, in relatively un-recent history, been a fairly benevolent patent holder. Much more so than most other large patent holding companies anyways.
The forces needed to move an atom on a surface would indeed vary wildly depending on the atom. You're right about valence playing a role, but very often you will see London dispersion forces having a very significant impact at extremely close ranges. These forces have more to do with the overall electron distribution and the resulting interactions rather than direct valence interactions.
Exactly! It still boggles my mind that computers do anything other than do math! Whats all this graphics and gaming crap they put on computers these days- just grab a pen and paper or go outside!
*humph* "applications" on a computer... what a waste.
Slashdot Mirror
Seem to be accepted fine with a 90% success rate. I've always noticed that whenever most people that don't use one every day pick up an iTouch/iPhone, for example, the error rate in typing and gestures can be even higher than 10% yet this does not deter people because the basic functionality like scrolling and "clicking" work fine. In my experience, people are willing to chalk up errors in slightly more involved gestures to "getting used" to the particular touchscreen's properties. I know several people running various 7 beta/RC builds on their tablets full-time and are absolutely in love with it. I'm considering getting a Lenovo X200 tablet later this year and I look forward to being able to try out 7 on it.
For shits and giggles I tried out the Win7 Beta on my eee900. Its a little pokey, but its definitely usable with 3 or more applications running.
Seconded! If you're ok with doing some coding but want a very technically interesting line of work, take some classes in bioinformatics or, better yet, systems biology if you have the math background (typically at least one semester of differential equations and possibly some linear systems). You could easily get a job as running a lab's high-performance computing requirements. If you're interested in further studies down the road, that kind of work experience positions you very well for a masters or doctoral program in a multidisciplinary field of study. If taking those classes isn't an option for you, find a faculty member that does that kind of work (look in CS, EE , bioengineering/biomedical engineering department, biochem, microbio, or bio for faculty) and get into their lab. Most of these guys will do anything they can to get someone with a CS background and you'll almost certainly be able to get full-time work with that lab or many others like it once you graduate.
I guess there's two ways to slice it: software development versus algorithms. I think it would be very easy (and in fact quite beneficial) for algorithm development to be integrated into existing math and science classes. Something like VPython could be a tremendous aid in helping physics students visualize vectors and how mechanics and EM problems "look". While the ability to compute (not only does it help you solve the problem, it helps you understand the nature of the problem as well!) is just as critical as the underlying problems it helps you solve (core sciences, math, etc), skills that are more commonly thought of as "software engineering" definitely belong in specialty classes and electives.
My apologies, I misread your reply.
Even if your point were valid, the microscope works, this gadget doesn't. You can reliably detect things like tuberculosis and malaria using a microscope, and if its a fluorescence model you could even do CD4+ T-cell counts manually. This cell-phone doohicky is incapable of all of those, or even of anything remotely medically relevant. As for your point, though, the w810i that they used in their contraption has a list price of about $200, still without managing to deal with the little problem that it.doesn't.work.
To elaborate on the inadequacy of this technique for malaria diagnostics, for example, the Poisson statistics indicate that a reliable diagnosis requires the analysis of about 2 microliters of blood. Now this doesn't seem like much except that 2 microliters of blood contains 10-14 million red blood cells. In order to just have all of those cells on the sensor while able to discriminate between adjacent cells that means you'd need at least a 90-megapixel camera on which to smear your blood sample. Now if you wanted to reliably detect a malaria infection, you would obviously need a lot more than 1 pixel per cell so the magnitude of the problem increases exponentially from there.
Oh its quite dead, I assure you. Journalistic sensationalism, however, is apparently quite powerfully alive.
It may work, but its completely useless from a diagnostics standpoint. Knowing the size of a cell is useless, especially with the resolution and sensitivity a cell phone camera could provide. Past publications from this lab show no reliable size discrimination below 15 microns, so even if it were useful information, it would be useless for human cell samples of which nearly all interesting species are smaller than or border this threshold. Sub-cellular resolution might help you do something like malaria diagnostics, but the amount of sample that needs to be analyzed and the magnification level you would need to be able to discriminate the plasmodium within a red blood cell are so high that, surprise, you're so much better off using a $100 microscope.
A. It can't detect HIV. No imaging technology short of electron microscopy can directly detect the virus itself and even electron microscope would be a retarded way to attempt diagnostics.
Even the original paper describing this technology showed that they have no sub-cellular resolution and even their size resolution was extremely unreliable for anything smaller than 15 microns... which all interesting human cells are (even if you could tell what size cells are you've accomplished.... nothing).
If they are suggesting they can do CD4+ T-lymphocyte counts they're either idiots, ignorant or both. There is no morphological distinction between a CD4+ and a CD4- T-lymphocyte. Even using fluorescence imaging (which they aren't) you have to be able to look at two colors of fluorescence (CD3 label to check to see if its a lymphocyte and a CD4 label to see if its CD4+) immunofluorescence is way too weak to be detected by a cell phone camera, especially a color sensor with 2 micron pixels. The CD4 antigen is never expressed at levels greater than approximately 50,000 / cell, the detection limit of a 5 micron pixel monochrome sensor (the bayer mask makes you lose about 30% of your light) is close to about 150,000 molecules. The bayer mask also makes your sensor pretty much useless for analytical applications, you're screwed if your green-fluorescent cell is centered over a red or blue-sensitive pixel which would happen in, oh, 66% of your pixels.
You run into almost identical sets of problems with every other so-called "application" of this "technology" so, yeah, bullshit.
IAABME.
You mean tough for human survival in Europe, Africa and the middle east. The Library's loss certainly didn't affect the civilizations of the Indian subcontinent and the Americas. Like the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen says, the philosophers of south-east Asia were asking questions the western world has only recently begun to ask itself while Europe was still in the dark ages.
Don't hold your breath. While the chip itself might be cheap to manufacture, its going to run into the same problems that have plagued immunochromatographic diagnostic technologies for years:
1. Antibodies are extremely expensive relative to other reagents that can be used (acid fast staining for mycobacteria, nucleic acid stains for plasmodia and other parasites, etc).
2. Its impossible to get a measure of the "confidence" of a measurement using this type of technology, so verifying results requires performing a completely different diagnostic test. But if you have no idea which tests gave confident results and which did not, how do you know which results to verify?
3. Cell-phone cameras are useless for quantitative analysis, especially ones that would need high dynamic range and high accuracy
4. Quality control and assurance is a bitch. Ask any epidemiologist that has experience working with malaria RDTs in the field. Some of them last 6 months, some last 1 month on the shelf.
5. In high-burden areas for certain diseases, using a disposable test methodology becomes extremely cost-ineffective.
While this might be interesting for things like simple urine tests or blood sugar tests, diagnosing infectious diseases represents a massive challenge for technologies like this. There's a reason we still use century-old microscopy-based technologies for diagnosing things like active TB and malaria even though they suck. I don't blame the researchers, they do good work and aren't focused on building a real product. Its the journalists that somehow make the leap between "we can detect glucose" and "revolutionary diagnostic technology."
And yes, IAABME.
"zeta potential analysis of gold colloids" returns no results whereas google returns 44,300.
to hear from someone with a bit more understanding of the reason the builds posted for MID are specific to Menlow and McCaslin and whether / why these builds would or wouldn't work on more generic intel hardware such as present in the current eeePCs not to mention how difficult would it be to get it to run properly (just install the generic i386 kernel?).
"Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too."
-Isaac Asimov
At my university, we had a student body president who, in order to draw attention to the farce that was our student government ran as "The Pirate Captain." So screw you ninja!
http://students.ncsu.edu/sgims/archive-85/p/the-pirate-captain-piavis-wjpiavis.html
that open source is saving those vendors' customers $60 billion.
While I tend to agree that Ubuntu (and many other distros!) have come a long way in terms of casual desktop user friendliness, its not going to push Linux into the mainstream. I may use it, many of my friends may use it, but until it becomes commercially mass-marketed Linux isnt going to be able to really gain traction in the sense that windows and even osx have. Offerings like Dell's definitely help, even the exposure Linux-based OS's such as the one on the eeePC will help to bring greater awareness, but as I'm sure many of you are aware, a great product great technology does not necessarily make.
I go to a pretty large tech school, the college of engineering is the largest college on campus by far and I think how much fun it is relative to a liberal arts school really depends on your more than some arbitrary rule that liberal arts schools are more fun. Just because the school is technical does NOT mean there won't be women, you might just have to go outside of your department's building to find them! Being a CS major or any other technical degree does not instantaneously turn you into a geek, chances are you might be but if thats the case you're probably going to have a lot more fun at a tech school where you'll get opportunities to interact with more people that have similar interests, You'll have the opportunity to get involved with student groups that may be entering into robotics or software competitions, you'll have access to more faculty in more departments in which you can get involved with undergraduate research. If none of these really interest you, then definitely, go to the liberal arts school, but shame on you slashdot for telling the poor kid that technical schools cant be as, or more, fun than a liberal arts school.
I call FUD. I installed Vista Business on my laptop when it became available over the MSDNAA to try it out. Install took two hours, was painless. I've installed XP and 2000 pro from scratch on an old Dell I upgraded numerous times before and the installer has never so much as squeaked at me. It can can be an absolute pain- but rarely, rarely ever is.
The problem isn't that its a waste, the problem is that nobody has seriously taken the long-term risk of trying. And when it doesn't work, trying again and again and again. It took 22 years of trying before a successful colony was set up on N. America. If NASA had made real attempts following the Apollo missions to establish a foothold, it could have easily set up a stable presence in 22 years, the problem is that they didn't. In fact nobody has really tried. ever. We have all the technology we need, we have the capabilities to make things dramatically cheaper (watch the last few minutes of this). We just haven't tried! What humanity needs right now is a repeat of what drove the first European colonization of the western hemisphere- someone to put up the cash and someone to risk their life(ves) to get there and try to stay there. Damnit, we should have been there 40 years ago.
I don't think he necessarily meant that the operating systems themselves would become irrelevant so much as the user experiences tied to them. Having just come back from a student group that was given the opportunity speak with a lot of execs and engineers out in the Valley, I can definitely sense that the focus has shifted from the desktop experience to the internet experience- to such an extent that inspiration has begun to bleed from one into the other. We're seeing this especially with mobile devices which seek to separate the Desktop and the Internet- the iPhone, as much as I am not a fan, and the iPod Touch have done this beautifully, the SideKick/Hiptop have done it almost as well, if not better (IMHO), The Nokia N8** and the eeePC have tried to skirt on opposite sides of a middle path and have been pretty successful at it.
The Next Big Thing(tm) won't be the next Windows, the next release of Ubuntu nor the next OS X or OS XI, its going to be a platform capable of delivering the look and feel of the web experience that you see on all of these mobile internet-centric devices on laptop and desktop platforms. The File Manager, the Application Window and Desktop will likely not disappear, but a fundamental change is coming to the world of Personal Computing and the result will not be recognizable as the Win/OSX/Linux OS's of today. (Disclaimer: to the End User anyways)
IBM is still the single largest patent holding entity in the US. The article is a bit old, but its still valid today. While I can sympathize with your concern as I believe the US patent system is in SEVERE need of a rethinking, IBM has, in relatively un-recent history, been a fairly benevolent patent holder. Much more so than most other large patent holding companies anyways.
The forces needed to move an atom on a surface would indeed vary wildly depending on the atom. You're right about valence playing a role, but very often you will see London dispersion forces having a very significant impact at extremely close ranges. These forces have more to do with the overall electron distribution and the resulting interactions rather than direct valence interactions.
Exactly! It still boggles my mind that computers do anything other than do math! Whats all this graphics and gaming crap they put on computers these days- just grab a pen and paper or go outside! *humph* "applications" on a computer... what a waste.