Give Ps a chance - Stanford Medicine Magazine - Stanford University School... A Nobelist’s quest to open our eyes to the next DNA. It’s called Poly P By SPYROS ANDREOPOULOS For the past 15 years, Arthur Kornberg, MD, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist at Stanford, has been deepening his relationship with one of biology’s wallflowers: a molecule he has nicknamed poly P. “It’s more important than I am,” he says, with a smile. It’s not just his love of a good biochemical mystery that keeps the emeritus professor working in the lab — though that’s certainly part of what drives him. Inorganic polyphosphate, the molecule Kornberg calls poly P, is older than the hills — literally. What exactly is poly P? Kornberg became fascinated by poly P in the 1950s. When Kornberg arrived at Stanford to lead the biochemistry department in the early ’60s, his work on DNA, for which he had received the Nobel Prize in 1959, had heated up. This underscored for him that the stationary phase of a microbial “bug” is anything but stationary. Promising. Comments? Back To Contents
Beginner's Guide to Web Hosting | UKcentric If you’re new to buying web hosting or running a web site, this page could answer some of those nagging questions. We’ll take you from the very beginning and work up to some fairly advanced concepts – but don’t worry, everything on this page is suitable for absolute beginners. What is web hosting? Think about the files and folders on your computer. They are stored on the hard disk of your desktop or laptop computer, ready for you to access them whenever you like. A web page is a file, just like your word processing documents. The difference is that web pages are generally intended to be seen by the general public. A computer on which web pages are stored is called a web server (because it serves pages, on request, to users on the Internet). The job of making web sites and web pages available to many users is called web hosting. Why do I need web hosting? It is technically possible to connect your own PC or Mac to the Internet and have it serve pages. What else do web hosting companies do?
Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope Photos Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope Photos All these pictures are from the book 'Microcosmos,' created by Brandon Brill from London. This book includes many scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of insects, humanbody parts and household items. These are the most amazing images of what is too small tosee with the naked eye. 2-2-11 An ant, Formica fusca, holding a microchip Surface of an Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory silicon microchip Eyelash hairs growing from the surface of human skin The surface of a strawberry Bacteria on the surface of a human tongue Human sperm (spermatozoa) Nylon hooks and loops of Velcro Household dust: includes long hairs of cat fur, twisted synthetic and woolen fibers, serrated insect scales, a pollen grain, and plant and insect remains The weave of nylon stocking fibers The head of a mosquito Head louse clinging to a human hair Eight eyes (two groups of four) on the head of a tarantula Cut human hairs and shaving foam between two razor blades Mushrooms spores
Computer learns language by playing games Computers are great at treating words as data: Word-processing programs let you rearrange and format text however you like, and search engines can quickly find a word anywhere on the Web. But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin? One test might be whether the computer could analyze and follow a set of instructions for an unfamiliar task. And indeed, in the last few years, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have begun designing machine-learning systems that do exactly that, with surprisingly good results. Starting from scratch “Games are used as a test bed for artificial-intelligence techniques simply because of their complexity,” says Branavan, who was first author on both ACL papers. Moreover, Barzilay says, game manuals have “very open text. So initially, its behavior is almost totally random. Proof of concept
John Holland, Emergence The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by Cosma Shalizi 46 From Chaos to Order by John Holland Addison-Wesley, 1997 Game Rules, or, Emergence according to Holland, or, Confessions of a Creative Reductionist John Holland was one of the world's first Ph.D.s in computer science, and even before that one of the first workers in machine learning. One of the things Holland has been thinking about for a long time is the puzzle of building blocks, of re-usable categorical parts. The problem of emergence is, roughly speaking --- and half the trouble with it is that everything we say about it is only rough --- the flip side of the problem of building blocks. Like almost all working scientists, Holland assumes that a valid explanation of (any one of) these puzzles is a reductionist one, one that explains the behavior or properties of the larger entity from those of its components and their interactions. Emergence is not so broad or ambitious as its title and publicity may suggest.
11.19.2007 - New technique captures chemical reactions in a single living... UC Berkeley Press Release New technique captures chemical reactions in a single living cell for the first time By Sarah Yang, Media Relations | 19 November 2007 BERKELEY – Bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered a technique that for the first time enables the detection of biomolecules' dynamic reactions in a single living cell. By taking advantage of the signature frequency by which organic and inorganic molecules absorb light, the team of researchers, led by Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering and director of UC Berkeley's Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center, can determine in real time whether specific enzymes are activated or particular genes are expressed, all with unprecedented resolution within a single living cell. The technique, described in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Nature Methods, could lead to a new era in molecular imaging with implications for cell-based drug discovery and biomedical diagnostics.
The Complexity and Artificial Life Research Concept for Self-Organizing Systems Why the Big Bang is Wrong undefined John Kierein The Big Bang theory of the universe is wrong because the cosmological red shift is due to the Compton effect rather than the Doppler effect. See The Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe by Grote Reber and Hubble's Constant in Terms of the Compton Effect by John Kierein. Reber showed that the Compton effect was the cause of the red shift in order to explain the observations of bright, very long wavelength, extragalactic radio waves. Quasars may be much closer than their red shift would indicate if they have an "intrinsic" red shift due to being surrounded by a 'fuzzy' atmosphere containing free electrons and other material. Some such quasars may be double stars, with one member being an ordinary star and the other exhibiting a large red shift and being labeled as a quasar. The red shift on the sun is obviously not Doppler since the sun is not moving away from us. Recently discovered cosmic radio bursts show dispersion as they interact with intergalactic electrons.
PC AI sucks at Civilization, reads manual, starts kicking ass The Massachusetts institute of technology have been experimenting with their computers' AI. Specifically the way they deal with the meaning of words. You might think that the best way to analyse this kind of thing would be with a human to PC conversation, like in Short Circuit. That's not the case. Instead, the boffins handed over PC classic, Civilization, and let the AI get on with it. They sucked - winning a mere 46 per cent of the time. Then the researchers handed over the instructions and taught the PCs a "machine-learning system so it could use a player's manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy." Associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, Regina Barzilay, offered insight into why they used a game manual to prove their point. Civ was picked because it's a really fun game, and they didn't want the computers to get bored during the testing. Not really. These kind of systems could make developer's jobs a lot easier. (via Reddit)
20 WebGL sites that will blow your mind | Feature | .net magazine Almost all modern computers and most smartphones have powerful GPUs, graphics processors that often have more number-crunching power than the CPU. But until recently web pages and mobile websites couldn't use them - meaning slow, low-quality graphics, almost always in 2D. That all changed when WebGL was released in the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome. WebGL, based on the well-known OpenGL 3D graphics standard, gives JavaScript plugin-free access to the graphics hardware, via the HTML5 canvas element - making realtime 3D graphics in web pages possible. Tech support Apple are supporting the standard too, so we can (hopefully!) So sit back, crank up your latest browser, and check out these demos - if you think you can do better, go for it: there are some hints and tips on how at the end. 01. 3 Dreams of Black 02. 03. No Comply is another WebGL demo from the Mozilla Audio API team, mixing video and graphics with a very 1980s-computer-game-meets-the-Matrix vibe. 04. 3Dtin 05. 06. 07. 08.
Alchemy - Open Source AI Statistical Data Mining Tutorials Advertisment: In 2006 I joined Google. We are growing a Google Pittsburgh office on CMU's campus. We are hiring creative computer scientists who love programming, and Machine Learning is one the focus areas of the office. We're also currently accepting resumes for Fall 2008 intenships. The following links point to a set of tutorials on many aspects of statistical data mining, including the foundations of probability, the foundations of statistical data analysis, and most of the classic machine learning and data mining algorithms. These include classification algorithms such as decision trees, neural nets, Bayesian classifiers, Support Vector Machines and cased-based (aka non-parametric) learning. I hope they're useful (and please let me know if they are, or if you have suggestions or error-corrections).