new drugs faster, rusty rain drops wallpaper, beam down the energy scottie
November 15, 2009 at 4:40 pm | In economic, photography, photoshop, science, wallpaper | Leave a CommentSeeking a Shorter Path to New Drugs
The M.I.T. project, called New Drug Development Paradigms, has gathered a powerful consortium of interested parties — including major drug makers and federal health authorities. One short-term goal is to identify, and rectify, the root causes of bottlenecks in the existing system. Longer term, the ambition is to create new prediction models, new ways to share information about the biology of diseases, and a new inclusiveness involving earlier participation of regulators, health insurers, health care providers and patients.
If that is to happen, some drug companies that have been fierce rivals will have to play nicer. Think of it not so much as swords into plowshares but as silos into platform-sharing.
The all powerful and perfect god – Free Market – somehow over looked a few things in the drug industry – retaining the trial and error method, spending lots of money on research that dead ended yet not letting other drug companies know so they too could waste money (ultimately paid by consumers in higher prices) duplicating the same research and coming to the same dead end. Probably a phenomenon that gave some drug executives a laugh until it came their turn to reach the point where it was their turn to R&D a miracle drug that was toxic. Now MIT via taxpayers will try and do what the great market god could not, get the pharma giants to be less insecure and stop flushing millions down the drain. While I have reservations about the wisdom of crowds mentality it does work when the information shared is grounded in collaboration with other people who are experts in the same field. Many great minds are generally better then one at solving complex problems associated with disease pathways. It pains me to say something nice about Merck, but they have started a virtual lab that encourages collaboration among researchers working for different companies. Better to have a percentage of a great patent then none at all.
Japan eyes solar station in space as new energy source
It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan’s space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.
[ ]….The researchers are targeting a one gigawatt system, equivalent to a medium-sized atomic power plant, that would produce electricity at eight yen (cents) per kilowatt-hour, six times cheaper than its current cost in Japan.
The challenge — including transporting the components to space — may appear gigantic, but Japan has been pursuing the project since 1998, with some 130 researchers studying it under JAXA’s oversight.
So even in the far east the free market god might not be living up to its Randian perfection.
weathered but calm, happy birthday internet, forgetting to offend is the new sin
November 15, 2009 at 3:56 pm | In Philosophy & Religion, culture, movies, photography, tech culture | Leave a Comment
I always thought that Philo Taylor Farnsworth, and Vladimir Kosma Zworykin for that matter, were two of the more under acknowledged inventors in history ( they invented the television – I lean toward giving Farnsworth most of the credit because he actually got something like the image transmission of modern TV to work). It is probably worse for the inventors of the internet, On the 40th anniversary of the first internet connection, a look back on how a flash of insight and a 20-minute meeting got it all started.
Forty years ago today, a team led by Leonard Kleinrock typed the “Lo” of “Login” into a Stanford computer, which promptly crashed before the command could be entered. But because Kleinrock’s team was sending this message from a UCLA machine, he had just taken part in one of the great milestones in communication history
The credit actually gets spread around: Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which eventually morphed into Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). IPTO director Bob Taylor. Charlie Herzfeld, ARPA’s then-director.Larry Roberts from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Leonard Kleinrock who did his MIT PhD dissertation on solving the problem of data loss transmitted over phone lines. Engineer Paul Baran and Donald Davies. In 1969 they managed to work out a way for different computers to speak with one another. Because we or our parents and grandparents provided the funding we all deserve some credit – the internet as a communal project sounds nice anyway. Though it took a few decades before we could perform the all important task of friending or defriending someone while simultaneously buying crap on eBay via those pimps at Paypal.
When some of you inevitably set out to create your masterpiece – a movie, a novel, a research paper, a painting, some digital art, a wood carving – do not forget to offend as many groups of people as possible because leaving some group out will offend some group that was included. 2012 Offends Catholics, Dimwits, Ex-Cons
The huge new disaster movie 2012 opens this Friday. Everyone but HuffPost blogger John Cusack drowns, but not before a statue of Jesus crumbles, a crack opens in the Sistine Chapel roof — right between the fingers of God and Adam — and St. Peter’s Basilica falls over on a lot of Italians. These images have offended the usual people in the I’m Offended Industry, but not for the reason you’d think.
The offense takers are offended because 2012 forgot to offend any Muslims.
Producer Roland Emmerich makes great movies to accompany the consumption of pop corn. That he offended someone or forgot to offend someone is pure accident. So Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is offended that some Christian icons are destroyed in a disaster movie. Bill has no official connection to the Vatican, though he frequently is pretentious enough to claim to speak for the entire Catholic faith. Now that seems offensive or at least delusional. When institutions or great architecture like St. Peter’s Basilica is destroyed in 2012 or almost destroyed in Angels and Demons, the audience is shocked and moved because even non-believers see St Peter’s as one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Movie’s mission to involve and manipulate the audience achieved. If a movie did not manipulate you, you just saw a bad movie.
to dobbs means to blame shift, filtered light, children and psychological control
November 13, 2009 at 7:38 pm | In culture, journalism, photoshop, sociology | Leave a Comment
Lou Dobbs is trying to blame some far left radicals – rhetoric and a mindset stuck in the 60s – for his leaving CNN. Maybe having insulted every group of Americans except rich white males Dobbs has proved that oneself can frequently be the worse of enemies,
Dobbs is known most widely these days for his inflammatory attacks on illegal immigrants. Stoking nativist paranoia, he has blamed undocumented workers for problems both real and imaginary, from lost jobs and violent crime to increasing leprosy and conspiracies against U.S. sovereignty. On more than one occasion, he has encouraged far-right suspicions about Barack Obama’s citizenship, allowing the “Birthers” to spout their theories on a network that had already discredited them (even on his own program).
There are legitimate concerns to be had in regards to illegal immigration. If the rule of law is a concept one subscribes to, they violate that rule. Being hateful about people who love America so much they are willing to risk arrest and deportation, is hardly the way mature adults should be handling the issue. As a practical matter Dobbs probably still possesses enough functioning cognitive ability to know that. That is part of what makes Dobbs so repugnant. He makes a multi-million dollar salary, not providing wisdom and insight, but exploiting xenophobia. he has no answers, but being bereft of any ability to calculate the answers, dishes out the wildest of accusations. Accusations and exploitation are cheap by the case, with the kind of money Dobbs will likely continue to make in other venues, he could pay a few bright people to do his thinking for him (smart ghost pundits as it were), but seems too egotistical to do even that. Should Lou run for president (as Joe Suggests he will) it would make a great office pool to see how long it takes him to self destruct and blame the “radical left” for yet another self induced failure.
Youths See All Parental Control Negatively When There’s A Lot Of It
Scholars tell us that parental control falls into two categories: behavioral control (when parents help their children regulate themselves and feel competent by providing supervision, setting limits, and establishing rules) and psychological control (when parents are manipulative in their behavior, often resulting in feelings of guilt, rejection, or not being loved). It’s thought that behavioral control is better for youngsters’ development.
But the study, which asked 67 American children (7th and 8th graders, as well as 10th and 11th graders) to respond to hypothetical scenarios involving both kinds of control, found that the youths put a negative spin on both types of control when the parents in the scenarios exercised a lot of control. Specifically, when parents showed moderate levels of control, they saw psychological control more negatively than behavioral control, but when parents were very controlling, they viewed both types of control negatively.
What kinds of controls that children respond to positively – where parents get generally good behavior and the child does not fell like they’re participating in the whole learning/growing up process about what constitutes good outcomes is a thin line to walk. Because in many ways we live in a Lou Dobbs- Bill O’Reilly- Hate radio unquestioning discipline, unquestioning devotion type of culture that belittles seeing answers in shades of moderation it fellows many adults see their parental roles that way. If children, being at a developmental stage of their psychological growth already see excessive micro-managing of their behavior and thoughts as bad wouldn’t that seem to indicate there is something unhealthy about an authoritarian approach to child rearing. Every bit as bad as parents that have trouble setting boundaries.
which came first the mental pathology or religion, each is the wind i like the best
November 10, 2009 at 5:09 pm | In Philosophy & Religion, photography, photoshop, sociology | Leave a CommentTags: technology
10 Suicides a Month at Ft. Hood — War Stress Is Taking Soldiers to the Brink
Tragically, Fort Hood has also born much of the brunt from its heavy involvement in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for more suicides than any other army post since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This year alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides each month – at least 75 have been recorded through July of this year alone.
In a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad.
[ ]…According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than “43,000 service members – two-thirds of them in the army or army reserve – were classified as non-deployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed” to Iraq.
In April 2008, the Rand Corporation released a stunning report revealing that, “Nearly 20% of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan – 300,000 in all — report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.”
To look at all the factors that lead to a tragedy, even one’s belief in a god and choice of religion is not merely fair game, its akin to ignoring crime scene evidence. Though it is also incumbent on observers to consider which came first the religion or the pathology. Since religion is based on beliefs and those with disturbing pathological disorders have rejected rational thinking and justified beliefs we should not be surprised when one acts as a magnet for the other. Borderline personalities are frequently attracted to religion and it also happens that the psychiatric profession does also. That does not mean that believing in an invisible friend that lives in the heavens is cause for alarm – other then their religion most theists are rational enough to function and live their lives without murdering anyone. Islam and Christianity are not polar opposites. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, Timothy McVeigh, Richard Polawski(right-wing Christian cop killer), Osama Bin Laden and James Adkisson (conservative Christian who gunned down two people in a church) all believed/believe in the same god. Christianity and Islam being the world’s largest religions are bound to attract their share of the mentally unstable. Do denominations or sects influence people to the point where they become violent. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) is generally considered the last war that was fought on purely religious grounds – at least that is what they tell us in the most popular history of western civilization text books. For a couple thousand years wars, whose violence were every bit as gruesome( though not as efficient) as current wars, were motivated by religion. Human history says we’ll kill each if properly motivated by religious leaders. Hasan lived in a very Christian centric culture, he went to an American high school and one of the nation’s best military colleges Virginia Military Institute, yet showed no signs of pathological behavior until a few months ago. Muslims have been and still serve in the U.S, military and with few exceptions serve as ordered. Many have received decorations for their service. The military’s DADT policy becomes all the more bizarre when one considers the military is well aware that it has radical Christians within its ranks (“They painted the war in Iraq not as an occupation but as an apocalyptic battle by Christians against Islam, a religion they regularly branded as “satanic.”) and had clues for months that Hasan had mental problems. So yea one can see where keeping gays out of the military should be a priority.
each is the wind i like the best. text by Amy Lowell
Harvard researchers say 1.46 million working-age vets lacked health coverage last year, increasing their death rate – The watered down to be bipartisan health care reform that might become effective in 4 years will not help these vets at all. Vets ( not including retired career military),
“Like other uninsured Americans, most uninsured vets are working people – too poor to afford private coverage but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care,” said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor at Harvard Medical School who testified before Congress about uninsured veterans in 2007 and carried out the analysis released today [Tuesday]. “As a result, veterans go without the care they need every day in the U.S., and thousands die each year. It’s a disgrace.”
Walk and recharge at the same time, Recharging Portable Electronics One Step At A Time
With each step, magnets bounce back and forth off springs inside the PEG, generating electricity. The springs amplify movement, allowing the PEG to make a lot more power than past attempts at capturing kinetic energy.
Sara Bradford, of Texas-based market research firm Frost & Sullivan, is impressed.
In the last paragraph of the article they hint that a miniaturized kinetic energy generator might be built into most small electronic devices eventually.
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