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Math

Crackpot Scandal In Mathematics 219

ocean_soul writes "It is well known among scientists that the impact factor of a scientific journal is not always a good indicator of the quality of the papers in the journal. An extreme example of this was recently uncovered in mathematics. The scandal is about one El Naschie, editor in chief of the 'scientific' journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, published by Elsevier. This is one of the highest impact factor journals in mathematics, but the quality of the papers in it is extremely poor. The journal has also published 322 papers with El Naschie as (co-)author, five of them in the latest issue. Like many crackpots, El Nashie has a kind of cult around him, with another journal devoted to praising his greatness. There was also a discussion about the Wikipedia entry for El Naschie, which was supposedly written by one of his followers. When it was deleted by Wikipedia, they even threatened legal actions (which never materialized)."

Comment Re:I'm not troubled... (Score 1) 568

Of course. And Al Capone went to jail for the rest of his life over tax fraud related to his business of murder, bribery, etc. Sometimes we prosecute people for what we can rather than what they really did wrong. You can be sure they are revising and closing loopholes so they can prosecute it for the right reasons next time.

Comment Re:!embryonic (Score 1) 116

By your logic, there is nothing wrong with forced abortions, because an embryo is just a mass of cells that "could potentially become a human with the right signaling factors and growth conditions." It is exactly the same as removing a tumor from a person without consent. That is just silly.

Observable facts inform our morals, but they do not decide them. You cannot derive should from is. Many people believe that because the natural course of embryonic stem cells leads to a human being, they should be considered a human being. If you disagree, you need to tell them where the dividing line between human and not human is. You know any such line is arbitrary. Until we decide on where that line is a society, doing anything within a reasonable range of that line is morally questionable. That does not mean immoral, just questionable. If you want it to be unquestionably moral, prove to a majority of the population why they are clearly not human yet.

Comment Re:!embryonic (Score 1) 116

The color of the sky is an empirical issue. We can look at it and know the answer. If nobody can look at it, then it remains an open question until someone can. Morals are not empirically observable. They are values decided upon by society. Therefore, you're entire analogy is fundamentally flawed and invalid.
Data Storage

Self-Growing Material Opens Chip, Storage Advances 30

coondoggie brings us this NetworkWorld article, which begins: "In the ever-growing desire to produce smaller, less costly, yet more powerful and faster computers and storage devices, researchers today said they are looking at a way to use self-growing fabrics that will let manufacturers build nano-sized high resolution semiconductors and arrays to answer that craving. Researchers at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) at the University of Wisconsin — Madison have come up with a method that uses existing technology to combine the lithography techniques traditionally used to pattern microelectronics with novel self-assembling materials known as block copolymers, researchers said. When combined with a lithographically patterned surface, the block copolymers' long molecular chains spontaneously assemble into the designated arrangements."
Music

Digitizing Rare Vinyl 397

eldavojohn writes "While the RIAA is busy changing its image to a snake eating its own tail, one man is busy digitizing out-of-print 78s. 'There's a whole world of music that you don't hear anymore, and it's on 78 RPM records,' he stated to Wired. Right now, you can find about 4,000 MP3s on his site, with no digital noise reduction implemented yet."
Biotech

New Scientific Evidence Emerges In Anthrax Case 216

sciencehabit writes "A Science Magazine investigation uses clues from a key document unveiled last week to reconstruct the trail that led the FBI to Bruce Ivins. Among the revelations: Anthrax fingerprinting was not critical to the investigation, as many reports have suggested. Rather, brute-force genetic sequencing, with the help of the J. Craig Venter Institute, helped crack the case. New potential motivations by Ivins are also revealed."
The Courts

Collegiate Resistance To RIAA In Michigan 175

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "There are now at least three complaints being investigated in Michigan against the RIAA's unlicensed investigator, SafeNet a/k/a MediaSentry, one of which was filed by Central Michigan University itself. Two other complaints have been filed by students, one from Northern Michigan University and one from University of Michigan. This appears to be part of the growing sense of exasperation colleges and universities are feeling over the RIAA's harassment."
Biotech

Cooking Stimulated Big Leap In Human Cognition 473

Hugh Pickens writes "For a long time, humans were pretty dumb, doing little but make 'the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,' says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, 'so strange compared to other animals.'"
Space

Virgin Galactic Shows the Finished WhiteKnight Two 212

Klaus Schmidt writes "Virgin Galactic today unveiled their WhiteKnight Two mothership, called 'EVE.' It is designed to carry the smaller SpaceShip Two into space. The rollout represents another major milestone in Virgin Galactic's quest to launch the world's first private, environmentally benign, space access system for people, payload and science. Christened 'EVE' in honor of Richard Branson's mother — Sir Richard performed the official naming ceremony — WK2 is both visually remarkable and represents ground-breaking aerospace technology. It is the world's largest all carbon composite aircraft and many of its component parts have been built using composite materials for the very first time. At 140 ft, the wing span is the longest single carbon composite aviation component ever manufactured."
The Internet

Cuba Getting Internet Upstream Via Venezuela 486

An anonymous reader writes "Seems like Cuba is working around the US internet embargo by teaming up with Venezuela: A confidential contract released yesterday on Wikileaks reveals Cuba's plan to receive internet upstream via an undersea cable to Venezuela, thus circumventing the enduring embargo of the US, denying Cuba access to nearby American undersea cables and overcoming the current limits of satellite-only connectivity. The connection, to be delivered by CVG Telecom of Venezuela, is to be completed by 2010 and will provide data, video as well as voice service for both the public and governmental services."
Government

Submission + - Bush claims executive privilege

gawiedeboef writes: ...in Valerie Plame Wilson case
The concept of executive privilege rings a special bell with readers of a certain age.
It was relied on by the Richard M. Nixon White House seeking to shield documents and personnel from inquiring congressional committees and prosecutors during the Watergate investigations.

President Bush quietly claimed executive privilege on Tuesday, after Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey requested the shield.
Mukasey is seeking to avoid delivering to congressional investigators documents dealing with interviews of Vice President Dick Cheney and members of his staff regarding the unmasking of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

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