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 Wednesday, December 4, 2002
Still more thoughts on PubScience [LISNews.com]
Elsevier is riding a sinking ship of a business model. Scientists will want to publish their works where the most people can read them. This will be done at some of the prestigious journals run by scientific associations. Take the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). They are publishing a huge number of papers. You can get online access for $100 a year or even get daily access. After 6 months access is free. Elsevier publishes specialty journals that only libraries can pay for. You can download their price list and see how many of these journals cost $5000 a year or more. These will be driven to the fringes since few people can afford their own subscriptions and access them online. As time goes on, 'proprietary' science publishers will have a very hard time making it, particularly since their databases will not work well with others. Check out highwire.org and see how it deals with links between journal articles. 6:34:32 PM 
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Nobel laureate warns of prions in animal muscle [Reuters Health eLine]
Simply finding the protein in the muscles infected mice does not mean you need to go directly to screening everyone. One, there is nothing to indicate that the protein will be found in people who are infected. Two, is it ethical to screen people for a disease that is not curable? Or if we have no idea of what the prognosis is if you have the protein in your muscle? There is a lot more work that needs to be done. 6:16:01 PM
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Revolutionary New Theory For Origins Of Life On Earth. Science Daily - A totally new and highly controversial theory on the origin of life on earth, is set to cause a storm in the science world and has implications for the existence of life on other planets. Research* by Professor William Martin of the ...
Did Life Originate Underwater? Slashdot
Theory of life takes sci-fi turn New Zealand Herald
Nature.com - Independent - and 7 related » [Google Technology News]
I am not sure where the originality of this report appears. The Miller experiments are very interesting but have never been adopted as some sort of dogma. They simply show how easy it is to make important organic compounds. People have also speculated that early forms of life used various substrates such as clay to begin organic reactions. An important aspect of any orihin of life theory is how to separate the relatively unstable organic compounds from the surrounding media. Otherwise, life would not exist. Cells help the necessary molecules to reach a high enough concentration to work. The idea that black smokers and other underwater energy sources provided the means for life to get going has also been around a long time. That is why people are hopeful that life can be seen on some of the larger moons of Jupiter, even under miles of ice.
Origin of life stories are usually just-so. It will be very hard to prove any one theory but many of these approaches well help us to see how easy it is to get started. Probably simply having an energy source, water and the right molecules will produce some forms of life eventually. It may happen differently depending on conditions. 5:47:48 PM
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The Wisdom of the Anthill [elearningpost]
I just got through reading Emergence by Steven Johnson that also discusses using 'ants' to solve complex problems. Figuring out when such bottom-up approaches work will result in some very interesting research in the coming years. This is what biology will be doing. we have been taking a top down, reductionsist approach for biological explorations the last 50 or so years. We are now trying to build the system back up. Systems biolofy will be exploring similar avenues. 5:22:58 PM
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The Future of the Entertainment Industries. Robert X. Cringely foresees the ends of the newspaper, magazine, and music industries as we know them, but the continued survival of the movie industry. I, Cringely | The Pulpit: ...Forgetting for the moment that some of these media people are greedy pond dwellers, let's ask the important question -- how are peer-to-peer file sharing systems going to replace $100 million movies? Peer-to-peer systems can share such movies, but since there is no real peer-to-peer business model that can generate... [Semi-Daily Journal]
Right on in many ways. I loved his comparison of the Content Cartel to the Anglo-Persian oil company in the 1920's. IN many way, the Content Cartel makes vast amounts of money simply distributing information, in ways that the actual creators, the people who should hold the copyrights, could not. Thus it made sense for them to enter into a Faustian deal with the members of the Content Cartel. But the coming age makes distribution much easier. So why may the deal with the Devil? What value-added aspect of the system will the Content Cartel provide? Because if they do not find one, they will be history. 12:15:25 AM
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High Tech Is Getting Really Cheap. For some time now, one of my standard points has been that high-tech goods greatly amplify our material standard of living beyond what conventional economic statistics suggest, but that high-tech goods do so only if we are rich enough to actually make use of them. Guess what? The prices of modern high-tech goods are falling so far and so fast that even the world's poor are starting to be able to afford to use them. Here's a quote by Arnold... [Semi-Daily Journal]
This is the sort of thing that really does change the world. And most Americans do not realize that our cellular technology falls far behind that of much of the world. We have the fantasy that our technology always is the best and that is simply not true. And it will become more common for our technology to fall behind as time goes on, since so many of the Content Cartel is really afraid of technology. 12:07:05 AM
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