McKesson Provider Technologies is a health care industry software vendor. A few years ago, they began to search for ways to cut costs for the hospitals and medical offices that make up their customer base. Switching to Linux was the obvious solution. Continue reading Health Care Business Switch to Linux
Yearly Archives: 2007
Regeneration
Planarian worms can regenerate new body parts (well, I know they don’t look like “parts” but you get what I mean). How do they do this? No one was quite sure until now. Continue reading Regeneration
1699 Captain Kidd Shipwreck Discovered
From Indiana University’s Press Room:
Resting in less than 10 feet of Caribbean seawater, the wreckage of Quedagh Merchant, the ship abandoned by the scandalous 17th century pirate Captain William Kidd as he raced to New York in an ill-fated attempt to clear his name, has escaped discovery — until now.
Gene Genie # 22
… the Blog Carnival, is at Sandwalk.
Two New Species of Mammal Discovered
The Foja Mountains have been the subject of investigation for a couple of years now, and new species are being found there on a regular basis. The lastest, from last June, is the discovery of a possum and a rat.The Foja Mountains are in Paupa, Indonesia, and form part of the norther ridge of the central mountain range on this large island. There are no records of visitors to this remote area prior to the late 1970s. In december, 2005, a joint international team of scientists bean documenting plants and animals in the area, and subsequently there have been reports of at lease one new bird species, twenty frogs, four butterflies, and a range of plants.
“During the June expedition, the team documented two mammals, a Cercartetus pygmy possum, one of the world’s smallest marsupials, and a Mallomys giant rat, both currently under study and apparently new to science,” CI said.The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat and visited the scientists’ camp several times, lacking any fear of humans.
It’s nice when your data just shows up…sources: This news report and this wikipedia piece.
How To Buy a Computer
I get email… In this case, virus-like but funny email. Pass it on… Continue reading How To Buy a Computer
Discovery Institute Discovers Irony
But fails to recognize it. Again.Just moments ago, the Discovery Institute posted a commentary on a paper that came out some time ago on dog evolution. I wrote about that paper because it made me laugh out loud (LOL). Indeed, I wanted to share this again, so I reposted my earlier post just moments ago.The new DI post is by Casey Luskin. I’ve misplaced the URL, sorry. Anyway, it turns out that the Discovery Institute is pretty sure that Artificial Selection is Intelligent Design, with the breeders being the Intelligent Agent. Of course, they are correct. Intelligent Design is real. If you make it up.(LOL)
Creationism Doubtful? What a surprise!
I woke up this morning to see headlines such as the following in my newsreader:Study Casts Doubt on Creationism … and St. Bernard Study Casts Doubt on Creationism….It turns out that the shape of the dog’s head has evolved over time, and that this can only be explained by evolution.The study looked at 47 St Bernard skulls over a 120 year period, and analyzed these in the context of ancient written specifications for the breed.
“We discovered that features stipulated in the breed standard of the St Bernard became more exaggerated over time as breeders selected dogs that had the desired physical attributes,” said Dr Klingenberg.”In effect they have applied selection to move the evolutionary process a considerable way forward, providing a unique opportunity to observe sustained evolutionary change under known selective pressures.”The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences tomorrow (Wednesday), are based on studies of St Bernard skulls donated by Swiss breeders to the Natural History Museum in Berne.[source]
Well, I must say that is very cool, but it is about as intensive and insightful as the average undergraduate thesis that I’ve supervised, and much less impressive than the best, especially the most recent one done by Betsy Burr, which examines selected variation across a sample of several thousand rodents.What is nice about this study is the way it is reported. It is utterly obvious that this study defies the tenets of creationism, as does every single study involving evolutionary biology. I’d love to see this become the standard for science reporting in the future. For example, here is my version, using this new standard, of several other headlines that are sitting in my newsreader from the last 24 yours or so: Continue reading Creationism Doubtful? What a surprise!
Oekologie #12
…the blog carnival, is here, on Matt’s Behavioral Ecology Blog.
Microsoft vs. Google
NYT: Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft
The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.
Messing with Wikiland
Wikileaks busts Gitmo propaganda team
The US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has been caught conducting covert propaganda attacks on the internet. The attacks, exposed this week in a report by the government transparency group Wikileaks, include deleting detainee ID numbers from Wikipedia last month, the systematic posting of unattributed “self praise” comments on news organization web sites in response to negative press, boosting pro-Guantanamo stories on the internet news site Digg and even modifying Fidel Castro’s encyclopedia article to describe the Cuban president as “an admitted transexual” [sic].
Dot-Mac Security Issue
Warning to Mac Users: Security Flaw with .Mac:
“The de facto online connectivity software sold along with many Apple computers, .Mac, has a Web interface through which users can check their ‘iDisk’ while away from their own computer. However, there is no Log-Out button in this Web interface, so most users just close the browser and walk away… not realizing that their iDisk has been cached by the browser and that anyone who wants to can open up the browser, go back to the link in History, and get into their iDisk completely logged in. From here, files can be downloaded and/or deleted. This seems like a minor security flaw via bad interface design, and podcaster Klaatu (of thebadapples.info) posted this on the discussion.apple.com site, only to have his post removed by Apple. Furthermore, feedback at apple.com/feedback has gone unanswered. The problem remains: there is no way for the average computer user to log-out of their iDisk on public computers. A quick review of any public terminal’s browser history could bring up all kinds of interesting things.”
YouTube Museum of Computing History
Warning: This site opens with a video in play mode, and it is a bit noisy. Normally, I would not link to such as site because I think that is obnoxious. But it is an interesting site.
Welcome to the Computer History Museum on YouTube. We’re committed to preserving and presenting the history and stories of the Information Age. Here on YouTube we offer videos of the many events and lectures at the museum.
Announcing the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data
Today, in conjunction with the Creative Commons 5th Birthday celebration, Science Commons announces the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data (“the Protocol”).The Protocol is a method for ensuring that scientific databases can be legally integrated with one another. The Protocol is built on the public domain status of data in many countries (including the United States) and provides legal certainty to both data deposit and data use. The protocol is not a license or legal tool in itself, but instead a methodology for a) creating such legal tools and b) marking data already in the public domain for machine-assisted discovery.
Bali: Are we there yet?
The Cost of twenty years of Reagan and Bushes has been very high. In about 1991, I wrote an article for a monthly newspaper in which I summarized the available data for Global Warming, and was very easily able to conclude that it was a real phenomenon with consequences already felt in a number of areas, a reasonably well understood mechanism, and a tangible set of solutions to work on. In 1997, the Kyoto protocol was signed on to by a number of nations (the US not included because of congressional Republican opposition). This month, in Bali, a re-run of something like Kyoto happened, and finally, the US is also signed on with most of the rest of the world.