|
 Saturday, August 31, 2002
Cold water thrown on warm ups. Nature Aug 30 2002 6:47PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]
I never found that stretching mattered. I often started playing without warming up and never had a major muscle tear. At most I would jog around to get the blood flowing, sometimes doing dexterity type exercises. What I did find that stretching did for me was increase flexibility. The one muscle pull I was susceptible to was a groin pull. One of my legs does not rotate out as well as the other. Playing volleyball or baseball, I would often pull the muscle on the inside of the thigh. Stretching exercises helps increase my hip rotation and I have not had a groin pull in 20 years. 2:58:39 AM 
|
|
Blue Planet: Bears, sex and Woody Allen. UPI Aug 30 2002 7:08PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]
A reasonably balanced article on the grizzly bear in Yellowstone. The problem with any Endangered Species success is that, while the species eventually does not become endangered, the processes that made it endangered in the first place are, well, still in place. So we have numbers for the grizzly that probably exceed any plan for success. But now they will begin moving into other territory that will cause political problems. Plus the grizzly is a symbol used by both sides of the political arguments. What I found interesting is that, at the bottom level, those people charged by both activists and the government to save the grizzly, show a lot of respect for each other. They just do not trust the larger organizations of each. More tansparent communication would always help here. As people can understand that this is not a black and white situation but one with lots of valid viewpoints, maybe a better solution can be found. IN the meantime. let them celebrate the tremendousgrowth in the bear population. 2:52:48 AM
|
|
African govts won't be pressed to accept GM food aid: UN. ABC Online Aug 31 2002 0:31AM ET [Moreover - moreover...]
U.S., U.N. Food Agency Urge Africa to Accept Biotech Food. Washington File Aug 31 2002 1:27AM ET [Moreover - moreover...]
Well, which is it? We are going to urge them but not press them. Sounds pretty weak. Just make up your mind. The main problem with GM food is that many of the companies pushing them have such little credibility as to completely negate any yseful purpose of the GM foods. These are the ones that add herbicide resistance to the company's own herbicude. Or have engineered plants so that no seed is produced, requiring the farmer to by new seed every year from the manufacturer. Or who sue for growing 'unlicensed GM food' if their engineered pollen makes it onto a neighboring organic field and pollinates the crop. It might just be better if some of these companies acquired new names (Accenture used to be known as Andersen Consulting after it was spun off of Andersen the accounting firm. Good choice since anything with ANdewrsen in it is damaged goods.) 2:42:45 AM
|
|
Drug protects fertility, offspring in mice after radiation exposure [EurekAlert!]
Here is a great story. Following radiation therapy, the oocytes in ovarys die due to apoptosis, normally a process that removes defective cells. Providing sphingosine 1-phosphate abbrogates this signal and allows the oocytes to survive. In mice, these females can mate and produce litters of mice that are normal by known standards. The possibility of unknown damage to the genome can not be ruled out but I would venture that the reproductive system is set up to remove most 'monsters' produced in this fashion. One thing transgenic research has shown is that, in many cases, you can knock out a supposedly important gene and still get viable young that display no abnormalities. It would be a huge boon to be able to retain fertility in females undergoing radiatio therapy if this can be moved into humans. 2:35:58 AM
|
|
The Blog Days of Summer [elearningpost]
Nice overview of blogspace. Not a lot of new stuff but some interesting links. Nice dog days of August article. But it did lead me back to a weblog and KM site that I had been checking out before, David Gurteen's Knowledge Log, and I found that he now has a newsfeed. I have subscribed. 1:35:06 AM
|
|
Why Should I Read Your 'Important' Text? [elearningpost]
Great article. Any site that ambushes it customers by not making important aspects of the site obvious will not be in business long. People will not stand for being ripped off. If you are viewed as just a consumer and a source of tremendous revenue, you will not stay around.Site design requires a lot of work so that important thinjs ARE obvious. I hate it when a site makes me look all over the place for an important link 1:30:46 AM
|
|
Schools, Tech: Still Struggling [elearningpost]
This reminds me of the decades long motif we heard during the 90s that the computer revolution was having NO effect on worker productivity. We now know this was false and that the increase in productivity is what fueled much of the economic growth. Computers in school will not change the world overnight but in a much more subversive fashion. Kind of like boiling a frog. Turn up the heat too much and it jumps out of the pot. But change it slowly, and it won't notice that the water is boiling until too late. 1:26:24 AM
|
|
More on Saudi web censorship....In today's New Yor .... More on Saudi web censorship....In today's New York Times, Jennifer Lee reports on the Berkman Center study by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamen Edelman. "The Saudi government is censoring public Internet access to a degree that goes significantly but haphazardly beyond its stated central goal of blocking sexually explicit content that violates the values of Islam." [FOS News]
What I find interesting is that they apparently allow access to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, except when it talks about woman's rights or any kind of suffrage movement. It burns me when any society refuses to use the resources of half its population. It is such a waste. They can never hope to compete with those groups that use as much of their 'personal' resources as they can. I firmly believe that strictly paternalistic forms of society will vanish from the Earth by mid-century. I just hope it can be accomplished relatively 'peacefully' without tens of millions of people dying in the meantime. You can not be a functioning scientist if you are always pessimistic (The work would be just TOO frustrating), so I am optimistic that adaptive, creative communities will find a way around any problems. God, I hope so. 1:22:48 AM
|
|
Wolfgang Schulz and Thorsten Held, Prospects of Gu .... Wolfgang Schulz and Thorsten Held, Prospects of Guaranteeing Free Public Communication, Journal of Information Law & Technology, August 16, 2002. Subtitle: Findings of an Interdisciplinary Study on the Necessity of Non-commercial Services on the Basis of German Constitutional Law. [FOS News]
An interesting perspective from Germany regarding regulation of the Internet in the 'broadcasting' sphere. It makes the case that the reasons for regulating broadcast journalism do not hold for the Internet. Nice quote: Solutions have to be found regarding the increasing variety of types of services emerging in the process of convergence. However, to base legal obligations exclusively on the unique role of broadcasting is now empirically less founded then it was in the last century [^] for other countries as well as for Germany. 1:11:10 AM
|
|
Love of books helps kids succeed in school, and life [LISNews.com]
Reading books activates parts of the brain that other forms of learning does not (Of course, video games activate parts that books do not;-). Children who read will have an advantage over those that do not, not only in creativity but in other cognitive skills that will be increasingly important in this changing world of the Third Wave. It is like conditioning skills at soccer practice. They are no fun and somewhat painful. But if you want to be able to run at full tilt in the 90th minute, you had better do them. This is a lesson my son just reacquainted me with, after one of his recent soccer practices. But it makes a nice metaphor in this case. 1:03:35 AM
|
|
Home schoolers hit hard by library cuts [LISNews.com]
Interesting link and comment. Many people pull kids out of public schooling becasue they do not like how (and on what) their tax dollars are being spent. Often these people also vote for tax reductions that eventually kill the libraries that are their vital resources. There is a county here in Washington that may very well cut all funding to their libraries. Since everything is available on the Internet. Of course, many people can only access the Internet from the library but no matter. I believe that helping foster greater learning and the creation of knowledge is one of the social contracts we make to support each generation. Cutting libraries should not be an option, yet it is one of the first to go. It will come back to haunt us. 12:58:31 AM
|
|
Knowledge Management Primer [elearningpost]
Looks like an interesting site. I'll have to look at some of the links> I hope it is more than just boilerplate about how KM will save the world, or how we need to just get the companies to embrace change. My company lived change every day. It selected for people who liked change, liked the thrill of not really knowing where the road led. And THEY did not really get KM (or actually, the KM they knew was the marketing gimmicks that large software houses use to sell their $100,000 packages. Naturally, they had quite some disdain for the term Knowledge Management). It is like all paradigm shifts. Those on one side are just totally incapable of communicating with those on the other side. Their world views are diametrically opposed. But, certain technologies can accomplish this conversion in a subversive fashion. Email is one example. You can not imagine how people effectively communicated before email. Even those of us who lived in that era have a hard time remembering truthfully, so pervasive is the email paradigm. Try this experiment. When was the first time you used email? For many, the paradigm is so complete that it seems they have always used email. In many cases they will probably suggest a time that is really much earlier than they did use it.
This train of thought comes from cleaning out my office. I found the instructions we had printed out for our first e-mail system. It was simply Vax Notes on our old Vax. Ii explained just what an email address was and other odd things. Then I noticed the date. It was only 10 years ago. And, most of the scientists still did not use the system. It was not until we moved to cc:mail that there was large adoption. Yet, it took TWO YEARS before you could be certain that someone would read their email at least once a day. I know because I watched it. I was astounded how long it took. People had all sorts of excuses why they did not have time to read email. Try to understand that. Not enough time to read email!Too many other things to do! Nowadays, we don't have enough time to read email because there is so much email. What a shift. I think programs such as Radio and Movable Type are the same sorts of programs. Decentralized applications for storing and moving knowledge will have the greatest impact at companies that need creativity to survive. They will be able to disperse usable knowledge faster than hierarchical companies with monolithic portals. 12:52:58 AM
|
|
|
Got through doing my third official business contact for the week. This was a tougith people visiting and foundation meetings but I got some work done on searching for a job. It is so much easier to submit a resume via the Internet but then I am sure HR personnel around the world are inundated with tons of resumes because it is so easy. Hope I can stand out. 12:01:15 AM
|
|
|
|
|
