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Comment: Bioinformatics for HS Student? (Score 1) 22

by superid (#38696222) Attached to: Biology Help Desk: Volume 4

Hi and thanks for the offer to answer questions. I'm going to repost something I wrote in the google science fair thread:

Ok slashdotters, I've had no luck getting this question answered elsewhere so I might as well try here. My son is very interested in coding. He's competent in Java and he's picking up c quite well. He's taken an interest in GPU programming and I know over the next year he will do OK with those concepts too (I've been able to get both OpenCL and CUDA code up and running). In other words, we've got the computer end of a sci fair project pretty well established. The problem is that while I know generally what bioinformatics is all about, I have no background or resources in the appropriate biology to help him find a worthy project.

Ideally, what he wants is 1) a bioinformatics problem with a large data set (yes I realize that is redundant by definition) 2) one that would benefit from GPU programming 3) a problem that makes some kind of physical testable prediction that could be tested.

Last year a kid (from Canada?) did a drug interaction study where he took candidate compounds and determined where on a protein they would attach. From that he found two compounds that could mate at the same time because their locations did not interfere. Thus increasing the effectivity. He actually clinically tested "his" drug on cells. Pretty impressive. I'm not expecting my son to reach that level but I'd like to find something real world and challenging that couples computer science with a physical biological process.

any input is greatly appreciated! gary.huntress@gmail.com

Comment: Plea for Help - Bioinformatics Sci Fair (Score 3, Interesting) 31

by superid (#38681940) Attached to: Google Science Fair Back For 2nd Year

Ok slashdotters, I've had no luck getting this question answered elsewhere so I might as well try here. My son is very interested in coding. He's competent in Java and he's picking up c quite well. He's taken an interest in GPU programming and I know over the next year he will do OK with those concepts too (I've been able to get both OpenCL and CUDA code up and running). In other words, we've got the computer end of a sci fair project pretty well established. The problem is that while I know generally what bioinformatics is all about, I have no background or resources in the appropriate biology to help him find a worthy project.

Ideally, what he wants is 1) a bioinformatics problem with a large data set (yes I realize that is redundant by definition) 2) one that would benefit from GPU programming 3) a problem that makes some kind of physical testable prediction that could be tested.

Last year a kid (from Canada?) did a drug interaction study where he took candidate compounds and determined where on a protein they would attach. From that he found two compounds that could mate at the same time because their locations did not interfere. Thus increasing the effectivity. He actually clinically tested "his" drug on cells. Pretty impressive. I'm not expecting my son to reach that level but I'd like to find something real world and challenging that couples computer science with a physical biological process.

any input is greatly appreciated! gary.huntress@gmail.com

Comment: MS Versus Metasploit (Score 4, Interesting) 89

by superid (#38555420) Attached to: Same Platform Made Stuxnet, Duqu; Others Lurk

The video is very interesting, but one thing really does annoy me. He talks about discovering the initial vuln and how they were able to understand it literally within minutes (around slide 15/16) and they realized how serious it was (100% successful loading of a DLL from a WebDAV path via LoadLib because control panel icons are handled in a different (broken) way).

Hey says that the vuln existed for years and that a 7 year old could exploit it because it was included in Metasploit (slide 16). He clearly indicated that Metasploit knew about this before MS and that they were tipped off by 1 or 2 other 3rd party malware researchers who sent in "just another LNK exploit" that they happened to bother to look at. He even said "it's a good thing we did [look at it]".

So this tells me that MS does NOT bother to review Metasploit scripts to get a leg up on zero days..... that surprised and annoys me.

Comment: Don't need more spectrum (Score 3, Insightful) 147

by superid (#37393488) Attached to: Jobs Bill Funds Safety Network With Spectrum Sale

I'm an EMT, there are 5 radios in my ambulance. I don't need more ways to talk to people. I need policies, documentation, good equipment, and most of all consistent interoperability training between multiple departments and jurisdictions. I really don't think the fix is more spectrum.

Comment: Time to Desktop (Score 2) 557

by superid (#37084606) Attached to: The Death of Booting Up

My desktop at work is part of a very large (many thousands) windows domain. My time from boot to usable desktop is measured in minutes, many of them, rarely under 10 minutes. I get to stare at "Applying Personal Settings" for much of that period. Yes, the help desk has been called many times. The only course of action is to completely rebuild the system. Nobody can seem to troubleshoot a windows domain performance problem.

Comment: Re:LaTeX (Score 1) 154

by superid (#30970402) Attached to: Chemistry Tasks For the Computer Lab?

I have one son in college and two in high school. I know a huge number of their HS friends, their interests and their abilities. One in 50 would be even remotely interested or benefit from learning LaTeX, and their interest would have nothing at all to do with chemistry. If you really use LaTeX you know that it is not a word processor. HS kids are generally comfortable with a word processor and IMHO there is no benefit in teaching them a new non-chemistry concept and toolchain such as LaTeX.

PURGE COMPLETE.

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