Cyphus - Slashdot User

Nicotine is the new wonder drug.-> 0

Submitted by Fantastic Lad on Monday July 09 2007, @06:14PM

Fantastic Lad writes "Smoking may be bad for you, but Researchers and biotech companies are quietly developing pharmaceuticals that are decidedly good for brains, bowels, blood vessels and even immune systems — and they're inspired by tobacco's active ingredient: nicotine. Nicotine acts on the acetylcholine receptors in the brain, stimulating and regulating the release of a slew of brain chemicals, including seratonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. Now drugs derived from nicotine and the research on nicotine receptors are in clinical trials for everything from helping to heal wounds, to depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, Tourette Syndrome, ADHD, anger management and anxiety. Smoking will kill you, but also keep you in good health? Another story about nicotine warding off Parkison's disease here seems to agree. -Who knew?"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Workflow Patterns and YAWL (Score 1) 58

by Cyphus on Sunday July 23 2006, @08:04AM (#15765667) Attached to: Do You Like Your Workflow or BPM Software?

When my company, a very small software house, looked into integrating with workflow systems, we quickly came across this site:

http://is.tm.tue.nl/research/patterns/

Which contains a list of workflow patterns which they use to compare the expressiveness of different workflow solutions. Finding many of them lacking, they have now gone on to produce YAWL http://www.yawl.fit.qut.edu.au/ which aims to address the shortfalls of the systems they looked at. I found it quite a nice academic approach to a problem which the rest of the industry seems to approach with a lot less rigour.

The solution we ended up going with however was Object Connections Common Knowledge http://objectconnections.com/products/CommonKnowle dge.asp, which is similar to YAWL in many ways.