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Medicine

Submission + - Programming Immune Cells To Treat Disease (acs.org)

Submitted by
MTorrice
MTorrice writes: "Some biologists would like to train patients’ own immune systems to treat diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders. They envision isolating a person’s immune cells and then programming the cells to destroy tumors or to stop other parts of the immune system from attacking healthy tissue. Now a team of German researchers reports a method that traps immune cells in microscopic water droplets and exposes the cells to chemical signals that could teach them the difference between friend and foe. The droplets mimic the cellular environments in which immune cells typically trade information about what to attack."
Businesses

Submission + - How 'Indie' Capitalism Will Replace Our Stagnant Economic System (wired.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "We’re beginning to see evidence of what I call Indie Capitalism. My use of the word “indie” is deliberate. “Indie” reflects an economy that is independent of the prevailing orthodoxies of economic theory and big business. It shares many of the distributive and social structures of the independent music scene, which shuns big promoters and labels. And as happens with many bands, so many of today’s successful creative endeavors began as local phenomena before branching out to new locations and networks.

Indie Capitalism is bolstered by a single, simple fact: New companies (those less than five years old) have been responsible for all the net new jobs in the United States for the past three decades. We celebrate the entrepreneur (including those within corporations who behave like entrepreneurs) because we value the entrepreneur’s creativity. It is that creativity that we need to make central to our economy and to our economic thinking."
Programming

Submission + - JavaScript Assembly Language (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: The idea of using JavaScript as a modern day assembly language for browser code is being taken very seriously by Mozilla. Asm.js is a specification for a high performance JavaScript assembly language and OdinMonkey is an engine that runs it really fast. It is a detailed specification for a subset of JavaScript. Notice that while this means that this isn't a new language there are new features which would be ignored by a standard JavaScript engine. For example, the language only has strictly-typed integers, floats, arithmetic, function calls, and heap accesses. This is achieved using annotations in the form of comments and a restricted set of operations which only work with the data type — for example logical operators convert numeric values to int32.

The fact that asm.js is a subset of JavaScript means that you can take an asm.js program and run it in a standard unmodified browser or JavaScript engine. However, to get any real value from using it you need it to be run using an optimizing JavaScript engine. This is the second half of the project. Mozilla is working on OdinMonkey, a JavaScript engine that recognizes when it has been fed an asm.js program and can apply automatic optimizations.
At the moment asm.js runs no worse than half the speed of native code. So who needs NaCL or PNaCL — JavaScript might be all we need.

Comment Re:First Amendment (Score 3, Interesting) 219

by davecb (#43069707) Attached to: Copyright Trolls Sue Bloggers, Defense Lawyers

In the era in which the Constitution was written, this wasn't a common practice. A good federal SLAPP law might classify then actions as an abuse of power, or a fraud upon the court, depending on whether one was a lawyer or a plaintiff, in order to make the punishment fit the crime.

Anyone want to start a White House petition for criminal sanctions against anyone who defrauds a court?

--dave (I can't, I'd have to start a 24 Sussex Drive petition) c-b

Submission + - Copyright trolls sue bloggers, defence lawyers (fightcopyrighttrolls.com)

Submitted by
davecb
davecb writes: "Prenda Law has commenced three defamation, libel and conspiracy suits against the same people: defence lawyers, defendants and all the blogger and commentators at "Die Troll Die" and "Fight Copyright Trolls". The suits, in different state courts, each attempt to identify anyone who has criticized Prenda, fine them $200,000 each for stating their opinions, and prohibit them from ever criticizing Prenda again."
Science

Submission + - Physicists Discover a Way Around Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Science Daily Headlines reports that researchers have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure the polarization states of light overcoming some important challenges of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle and demonstrating that it is possible to measure key related variables, known as "conjugate" variables, of a quantum particle or state directly. Such direct measurements of the wavefunction had long seemed impossible because of a key tenet of the uncertainty principle — the idea that certain properties of a quantum system could be known only poorly if certain other related properties were known with precision. "The reason it wasn't thought possible to measure two conjugate variables directly was because measuring one would destroy the wavefunction before the other one could be measured," says co-author Jonathan Leach. The direct measurement technique employs a "trick" to measure the first property in such a way that the system is not disturbed significantly and information about the second property can still be obtained. This careful measurement relies on the "weak measurement" of the first property followed by a "strong measurement" of the second property. First described 25 years ago, weak measurement requires that the coupling between the system and what is used to measure it be, as its name suggests, "weak," which means that the system is barely disturbed in the measurement process. The downside of this type of measurement is that a single measurement only provides a small amount of information, and to get an accurate readout, the process has to be repeated multiple times and the average taken. Researchers passed polarized light through two crystals of differing thicknesses: the first, a very thin crystal that "weakly" measures the horizontal and vertical polarization state; the second, a much thicker crystal that "strongly" measures the diagonal and anti-diagonal polarization state. As the first measurement was performed weakly, the system is not significantly disturbed, and therefore, information gained from the second measurement was still valid. This process is repeated several times to build up accurate statistics. Putting all of this together gives a full, direct characterization of the polarization states of the light."

Submission + - Swiss vote against exorbitant salaries of managers (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
hinterwaeldler
hinterwaeldler writes: "In 2012, the CEO of swiss pharma company Novartis earned 45 million. Even during the financial crisis the top management of swiss banks helped themselves to salaries and compensations worth tens of millions while laying-off thousands of employees. The problem was identified as managers being essentially able to set each others salaries with little control of the share holders. This led to a huge public outcry against the self-serving by "Rip-Off" managers and the launching of the "Abzocker Initiative" by concerned citizens around Thomas Minder. The initiative aims to strengthen the control of share holders over managers salaries and will outright outlaw practices such as golden parachutes or bonus payments for fusions. The initiative was accepted this sunday by swiss voters with a majority of 68%."
DRM

Submission + - DRM applied to furniture manufacture: Chair self-destructs after 8 uses (hexus.net)

Submitted by
unts
unts writes: "Taking DRM further than it's gone before, a group of designers have built a DRM'd chair that will melt its own joints and destroy itself after 8 uses. The chair uses an Arduino and sensors to monitor the number of uses, then triggers the melting of a set of joints that hold it together, making the product unusable without some carpentry skills. The video of device at work is both amusing and a little disconcerting... could a company decide that this is a genuinely good idea? Maybe some more spectacular pryo effects would make sure nobody tries to circumvent the DRM measures."

Submission + - Seattle Lawmaker Wants to Tax Breathing (seattlebikeblog.com)

Submitted by terbeaux
terbeaux writes: The fact that Rep Ed Orcutt (R — WA) wants to tax bicycle use is not extraordinary. The representative's irrational conviction is. SeattleBikeBlog has confirmed reports that Orcutt does not feel bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have “an increased heart rate and respiration.” When they contacted him he clarified that “You would be giving off more CO2 if you are riding a bike than driving in a car...” Cascade blog has posted the full exchange between Rep Ed Orcutt and a citizen concerned about the new tax.

All of this is in spite of Orcutt receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from The University of Maine.
Databases

Submission + - Giant database of school children. What could go wrong? (reuters.com) 1

Submitted by asjk
asjk writes: The database includes millions of children and documents their names, addresses, disabilities and other statistics and demographics.Federal law, the article reports, allows for files to be shared with private companies. This, it is further reported, is already underway.
Science

Submission + - Nature Publishing Group join forces with Frontiers (frontiersin.org)

Submitted by andr1976
andr1976 writes: Recently it was announced that NPG (publishing the scientific journal Nature etc) is teaming up with the open-access publisher Frontiers. The news is interesting since the quality of open access journals may vary a lot from say PNAS and PLoS One to more low-end journals. The NPG/Frontiers alliance may be seen as a huge quality endorsement.

Comment More emphasis, please! (Score 1) 91

by davecb (#43053857) Attached to: Canada Launches ACTA Bill

This is Mr. Harper, whose Reform/Alliance/Conservative party supposedly stands for individual liberty over the oppression of the corporations, fairness to Canadians and loyalty to the principles of peace, order and good government.

Their actions are a betrayal of their own members, the legalization of the oppression of citizens by corporations and the subversion of Canadian judicial independence from the U.S.

I'm sure his antediluvian core supporters will think this is a good idea, but I suspect anyone under fifty will find it at least a little suspicious!

This is really rather important: More emphasis! More emphasis!

--dave

Comment Rick Falkvinge and most of Sweden have 100MB fibre (Score 2) 573

by davecb (#43035661) Attached to: Time Warner Cable: No Consumer Demand For Gigabit Internet

In the article Trusting Telcos With Internet Is Like Trusting Fox With Henhouse, Rick writes

To people in Sweden, this seemed mind-bogglingly odd: in the small Scandinavian country, private entrepreneurs had been fibering apartment blocks wholesale for years. I had fiber in my own apartment in 1999, and keep enjoying a 100 megabit-connection with several static, public IPs – from where you’re reading this article, as I run my server from home.

The take-home from this is that telcos have a conflict of interest, while hydro companies have underused poles in your neighbourhood.

Comment Re:Different countries (Score 2) 126

by davecb (#42931039) Attached to: Publisher Sues University Librarian Over His Personal Blog Posts

Yup, but the librarian in question didn't stick to safe subjects like race, religion or colour (:-))

--dave
[In case people haven't been following Canadian politics, there's a real debate ongoing in Canada about when merely racist/sexist/religious language turns into inciting attacks on people who are the wrong race, colour or religion. See "Ezra Levant" on Wikipedia if you want an activist and libertarian position on the debate]

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