Common roadblocks to Linux adoption demystified
An attempt to explain some of the biggest things standing in the way of the home user adopting Linux for their desktop operating system.
Emma Watson Beats Daniel Radcliffe as Top Potter Star Online
Daniel Radcliffe may play the leading role, but it is Emma Watson that is the most sought out of the young Harry Potter actors online. UK Internet searches for ?Emma Watson? have soared in the past two weeks on the back of premieres in cities around the globe. Last week, UK internet searches for "Emma Watson" were three times those for ... (Read on Source)
Hosting a Search Engine Friendly Site
Certified Internet Webmaster Herman Drost helps you make sure your website is spotted by the search engines. First, he explains how to use a "301 redirect" to keep high search engine rankings ...
Blending Branding, Design and Digital
... Digital services on offer include web design and development, CD Rom and DVD authoring, search engine optimisation, online marketing, motion graphics ...
Saturn's rings 'may live forever'
New observations indicate Saturn's iconic rings may be billions of years old - far older than previously thought.
Computer Game?s High Score Could Earn The Nobel Prize In Medicine
Gamers have devoted countless years of collective brainpower to rescuing princesses or protecting the planet against alien invasions. This week researchers at the University of Washington will try to harness those finely honed skills to make medical discoveries, perhaps even finding a cure for HIV.
A new game, named Foldit, turns protein folding into a competitive sport. Introductory levels teach the rules, which are the same laws of physics by which protein strands curl and twist into three-dimensional shapes - key for biological mysteries ranging from Alzheimer’s to vaccines.
After about 20 minutes of training, people feel like they’re playing a video game but are actually mouse-clicking in the name of medical science. The free program can be found here.
The game was developed by doctoral student Seth Cooper and postdoctoral researcher Adrien Treuille, both in computer science and engineering, working with Zoran Popovic, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering; David Baker, a UW professor of biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; and David Salesin, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. Professional game designers provided advice during the game’s creation.
“We’re hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it’s done by,” said Popovic, who presented the project today at the Games for Health meeting in Baltimore. “Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.”
Proteins, of which there are more than 100,000 different kinds in the human body, form every cell, make up the immune system and set the speed of chemical reactions. We know many proteins’ genetic sequence, but don’t know how they fold up into complex shapes whose nooks and crannies play crucial biological roles.
Computer simulators calculate all possible protein shapes, but this is a mathematical problem so huge that all the computers in the world would take centuries to solve it. In 2005, Baker developed a project named Rosetta@home that taps into volunteers’ computer time all around the world. But even 200,000 volunteers aren’t enough.
“There are too many possibilities for the computer to go through every possible one,” Baker said. “An approach like Rosetta@home does well on small proteins, but as the protein gets bigger and bigger it gets harder and harder, and the computers often fail.
“People, using their intuition, might be able to home in on the right answer much more quickly.”
Rosetta@home and Foldit both use the Rosetta protein-folding software. Foldit is the first protein-folding project that asks volunteers for something other than unused processor cycles on their computers or Playstation machines. Foldit also differs from recent human-computer interactive games that use humans’ ability to recognize images or interpret text. Instead, Foldit capitalizes on people’s natural 3-D problem-solving skills.
The intuitive skills that make someone good at playing Foldit are not necessarily the ones that make a top biologist. Baker says his 13-year-old son is faster at folding proteins than he is. Others may be even faster.
“I imagine that there’s a 12-year-old in Indonesia who can see all this in their head,” Baker says.
Eventually, the researchers hope to advance science by discovering protein-folding prodigies who have natural abilities to see proteins in 3-D.
“Some people are just able to look at the game and in less than two minutes, get to the top score,” said Popovic. “They can’t even explain what they’re doing, but somehow they’re able to do it.”
The game looks like a 21st-century version of Tetris, with multicolored geometric snakes filling the screen. A team that includes a half-dozen UW graduate and undergraduate students spent more than a year figuring out how to make the game both accurate and engaging. They faced some special challenges that commercial game developers don’t encounter.
“We don’t know what the best result is, so we can’t help people or hint people toward that goal,” Popovic explained. The team also couldn’t arbitrarily decide to make one move worth 1,000 bonus points, since the score corresponds to the energy needed to hold the protein in that shape.
Almost 1,000 players have tested the system in recent weeks, playing informal challenges using proteins with known shapes. Starting this week, however, the developers will open the game to the public and offer proteins of unknown shapes. Also starting this week, Foldit gamers will face off against research groups around the world in a major protein-structure competition held every two years.
Beginning in the fall, Foldit problems will expand to involve creating new proteins that we might wish existed - enzymes that could break up toxic waste, for example, or that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Computers alone cannot design a protein from scratch. The game lets the computer help out when it’s a simple optimization problem - the same way that computer solitaire sometimes moves the cards to clean up the table - letting the player concentrate on interesting moves.
Eventually, the researchers hope to present a medical nemesis, such as HIV or malaria, and challenge players to devise a protein with just the right shape to lock into the virus and deactivate it. Winning protein designs will be synthesized in Baker’s lab and tested in petri dishes. High-scoring players will be credited in scientific publications the way that top Rosetta@home contributors already are credited for their computer time.
“Long-term, I’m hoping that we can get a significant fraction of the world’s population engaged in solving critical problems in world health, and doing it collaboratively and successfully through the game,” Baker said. “We’re trying to use the brain power of people all around the world to advance biomedical research.”
Foldit includes elements of multiplayer games in which people can team up, chat with other players and create online profiles. Over time the researchers will analyze people’s moves to see how the top players solve puzzles. This information will be fed back into the game’s design so the game’s tools and format can evolve.
[Hannah Hickey @ University of Washington]
Whither desktop search?
Ahead in the Clouds: The Future of Desktop Search by Bill Greenwood, Information Today (July/Aug) Desktop search - does it have a future? This article points out that desktop is a misnomer - it's the indexing of web-based information --... (Read on Source)
Kiwi botmaster escapes conviction despite guilty plea
Police think skills could be handy An NZ teenager who became notorious for masterminding the creation of one of the largest cybercrime networks has escaped conviction, despite admitting computer hacking and fraud offences.?
BDI Denied Leave To File Summary Judgment Motion
NEW YORK - In his Nov. 2 status order, ephedra multidistrict litigation Judge Jed S. Rakoff confirmed a ruling by MDL Special Master James Niss, denying a defendant leave to file additional motions for summary judgment (In Re: Ephedra Products Liability Litigation, 04 M.D. 1598; Russell Wilburn v. N.V.E., Inc., No. 06 Civ. 13046, S.D. N.Y.; See September 2007, Page 6). Full story on lexis.com
Italian job: Thriller coming to U.S.
Translated fiction does not have much of a shelf life in the United States, in particular for Italian works, which suffer from a lack of a marketing push and an American appetite for books about the mob. But Giorgio Faletti's "I Kill" is set to break through.
Good News: Gorillas Thrive
Conservationists find 125,000 undiscovered western lowland gorillas in Africa, suggesting the species is safe (Read on Source)
gOS 3.0 Goes Gadget Crazy
Desktop Linux: "gOS today announced release 3 of its Google-oriented consumer Linux distro, adding support for Google Gadgets. gOS 3 Gadgets offers access to more than 100,000 iGoogle and Google Gadgets, says the company, and also preloads WINE 1.0 and the LXDE (Lightweight X Desktop Environment) desktop."
Check Out The RWN Forum
The Right Wing News Forum has now cracked the 200 member mark. The forum isn't flying as fast as I'd like yet, but the traffic and number of posts is picking up. Feel free to join the forum and participate... (Read on Source)
Summer Olympics get mobile video neophytes to tune in
Half of the mobile users trying to access NBC's streaming Olympic content are new to the technology, NBC has found, and millions more are watching video on NBC's Olympic website. Considering that NBC was previously scared of offering content online, it looks like the "billion-dollar research lab" is being put to good use.
Turn nabs $15 million for search-like ad tech (CNET)
CNET - Online publishers are increasingly selling ad space on their sites with the help of third-party advertising networks--a trend that's contributing to the rise of newfangled ad technologies.
Memory vulnerability found on Windows Vista
... is revealed. That is why Windows is always on the target of hackers. And Windows Vista is not an exception of the rule. New vulnerability of Windows Vista was revealed ...
Taking the Pulse of the Eclipse Ecosystem
Java training and education has never been easy. Not only are the language and its third-party and community offerings constantly moving targets, each developer has his or her own preferences, plug-ins inventory and habits. What's more, the"book knowledge" gained in many course settings can vary wildly from what happens in the"real world" of communities and teams.
Perhaps it's no longer safe to sleep?
Last night I had a dream in which I was trying to schedule the next faculty meeting and I was having trouble because McCain wasn't available on Monday mornings. Yes, McCain was on the faculty in my department. Makes no sense whatsoever. And I'm more than a little bothered by the thought of him invading my dreams. (Read on Source)
Sept. 17, 1683: Van Leeuwenhoek Gives Us Reason to Brush and Floss
1683: Anton van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to Britain's Royal Society describing the "animalcules" he observed under the microscope. It's the first known description of bacteria.
Van Leeuwenhoek had a varied career in his hometown of Delft, Netherlands. He earned money with stints as fabric merchant, surveyor, wine assayer and minor city official. He also served as trustee of the estate of painter Jan Vermeer, who died bankrupt.
One thing he did not do was invent the microscope, regardless of his glorious association with that instrument. Nor did his well-known contemporary, the Englishman Robert Hooke. The compound microscope (using an ocular and an objective lens in series) was invented in the 1590s, some four decades before their birth.
Van Leeuwenhoek, in fact, didn't even use a compound microscope. Despite the eventual superiority of the concept, the compound designs of his time couldn't produce a clear image at much more than 20x or 30x magnification.
After seeing Hooke's illustrated and very popular book Micrographia, van Leeuwenhoek learned to grind lenses some time before 1668, and he began building simple microscopes. This jack-of-all-trades became a master of one.
His simple microscope design used a single lens mounted in a brass plate. A sharp point held the specimen for examination. One screw moved the specimen into position in front of the lens, and another screw moved it backward or forward into focus.
(Fewer than 10 of van Leeuwenhoek's original microscopes survive, but you can use these plans to build a replica if you're so inclined.)
Van Leeuwenhoek had to hold the 3- or 4-inch instrument close to his eye. Besides good lighting, it required sharp eyesight and a fair dose of patience. Van Leeuwenhoek had both. He built the best microscopes of his day, achieving magnifications above 200x.
Delft's deft optician also had a fair dose of curiosity. He started writing letters to England's Royal Society in 1673, with descriptions of what he saw. One letter in 1674 detailed his observations of lake water, in which he detected green spiral algae.
The Royal Society translated van Leeuwenhoek's letters from Dutch and published them in English and Latin. His missive of Sept. 17, 1683, detailed how he took plaque from between his teeth and from four other people, including two who had never cleaned their teeth. It was, he wrote, "a little white matter, which is as thick as if 'twere batter." Continuing:
The "unbelievably great company of living animalcules ... were in such enormous numbers," van Leeuwenhoek wrote, "that all the water ... seemed to be alive." These are among the first recorded observations of living bacteria.
Van Leeuwenhoek was also the first to see foraminifera fossils in minerals. He discovered blood cells (confirming William Harvey's work on circulation a few decades earlier) animal sperm cells, nematodes and rotifers.
Van Leeuwenhoek sent more than just letters to London. He sent specimens, and some of his original samples were rediscovered in 1981 in the strong room of the Royal Society. Astonishingly, they were so well prepared that they could still be examined under modern microscopes.
So, van Leeuwenhoek's place in history is not as the inventor of anything, but as a scientist, the founder of experimental microbiology.
Source: University of California Museum of Paleontology
OK! BABY BUST
OK! magazine is getting out of the baby- and wedding-picture business. Ever since Kent Brownridge took control, sources said, "We've been told no more picture buying, and to keep readers interested we will have to 'get creative.' The biggest numbers...
Nokia to unveil touch-screen phone
The company plans to unveil its first touch-screen phone next week at an event in London, according to a Reuters report.
Trimming Budgets Through Alternative Online Payments
The U.S. economy has entered a vicious cycle where housing, employment and financial troubles are forcing consumers to tighten their purse strings and closely evaluate their every purchase. Retailers are also feeling the grip of a tightening economy as they compete aggressively for a diminishing number of buyers' dollars.
Southern Wall Of Jerusalem That Dates To Time Of Hasmonean Dynasty Discovered On Mount Zion
An exciting discovery in Jerusalem constituting extraordinary remains of the wall of the city from the time of the Second Temple (second century BCE-70 CE) that was built by the Hasmonean kings and was destroyed during the Great Revolt, and also the remains of a city wall from the Byzantine period (324-640 CE) which was built on top of it, were uncovered in an extensive excavation that is currently underway on Mount Zion.
Secret Rocket Balls Target WMD Bunkers
The Pentagon has a new secret weapon to neutralize WMD-filled bunkers: hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel, that throw themselves around at random at high speed — and turn the place into an inferno.
WP 2.7 fun: complete hcards
WordPress 2.7 has an awesome new thing: it turns the comments into hCards by default. An hCard is the microformat version of a vcard, which, with microformat extensions for your browser, you can then save the data of those commenters in your address book. (Read on Source)
Plane en route to NY with 11 on board is missing
A plane en route to New York with 11 people on board disappeared after taking off from the Dominican Republic, authorities said ...
In the Paint: Hawks regain Atlanta's love, interest - USA Today
 SLAM! Sports | In the Paint: Hawks regain Atlanta's love, interest USA Today - By Doug Benc, Getty Images By Chris Colston, USA TODAY ATLANTA - When the Atlanta Hawks host the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics Wednesday night at Philips Arena, they will have a chance to capture the imagination of a city that even a longtime ... Celtics wary of Hawks Adding web of intrigue |
Report: Samsung Readies Google Phone (PC World)
PC World - Samsung will roll out a mobile phone based on the Google Android operating system by the second quarter of 2009, according to a report from Korean news agency ETNews. While details are sketchy, Samsung will reportedly release the phone via cellular carriers Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile.
Judge Approves Common Fund Assessment Reallocation
NEW YORK - The ephedra multidistrict litigation judge on Oct. 17 granted a motion by the plaintiffs to change the common benefit fee for each gross settlement to allocate 1 percent to expenses and 5 percent to attorney fees (In Re: Ephedra Products Liability Litigation, 04 M.D. 1598 [JSR], S.D. N.Y.; See October 2007, Page 8). Full story on lexis.com
Name: SyroBro