A pretty girl in crimson rose (8)

10:51:03 PM    

Hubmed creates PubMed Newsfeeds

Ecto-5'-nucleotidase (CD73) regulation by hypoxia-inducible factor-1 mediates permeability changes in intestinal epithelia..

J Clin Invest. 2002 Oct; 110(7): 993-1002
Synnestvedt K, Furuta GT, Comerford KM, Louis N, Karhausen J, Eltzschig HK, Hansen KR, Thompson LF, Colgan SP

Under conditions of limited oxygen availability (hypoxia), multiple cell types release adenine nucleotides in the form of ATP, ADP, and AMP. Extracellular AMP is metabolized to adenosine by surface-expressed ecto-5'-nucleotidase (CD73) and subsequently activates surface adenosine receptors regulating endothelial and epithelial barrier function. Therefore, we hypothesized that hypoxia transcriptionally regulates CD73 expression. Microarray RNA analysis revealed an increase in CD73 and ecto-apyrase CD39 in hypoxic epithelial cells. Metabolic studies of CD39/CD73 function in intact epithelia revealed that hypoxia enhances CD39/CD73 function as much as 6 +/- 0.5-fold over normoxia. Examination of the CD73 gene promoter identified at least one binding site for hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) and inhibition of HIF-1alpha expression by antisense oligonucleotides resulted in significant inhibition of hypoxia-inducible CD73 expression. Studies using luciferase reporter constructs revealed a significant increase in activity in cells subjected to hypoxia, which was lost in truncated constructs lacking the HIF-1 site. Mutagenesis of the HIF-1alpha binding site resulted in a nearly complete loss of hypoxia-inducibility. In vivo studies in a murine hypoxia model revealed that hypoxia-induced CD73 may serve to protect the epithelial barrier, since the CD73 inhibitor alpha,beta-methylene ADP promotes increased intestinal permeability. These results identify an HIF-1-dependent regulatory pathway for CD73 and indicate the likelihood that CD39/CD73 protects the epithelial barrier during hypoxia. [HubMed - cd39]

This is an example of the output from a newsfeed for the term CD39. This is omething that would make research incredibly useful for most scientists. The newsfeed would get updated as PubMed does, so that one new entries for CD39 (or any term) get into Pub Med, the scientist is quickly notified. They can then blog the info and get it dispersed.  10:44:31 PM    

Group mind at work.

Is this mob just too smart?. Collective Detective, www.collectivedetective.org, is an online community dedicated to Collective Gaming and Immersive Entertainment. Collective Detective members who joined together to play Terraquest, www.terraquest1.com, an online game by MindQuest Entertainment, solved the first phase of the game only Three days after Terraquest's launch. Phase One, offering a $25,000 prize for it's solution, was scheduled to last for a month. However, the organized "Detectives" on Collective Detective, managed to pool information and rapidly sort through clues, leading them to the solution, long before the planned phase conclusion. There are five phases remaining in the game.

Collective Detective, located at www.collectivedetective.org, is a subscription based, member driven community, custom developed for the Immersive Entertainment genre. Collective Detective provides the community with a forum for "human information filtering," a unique problem-solving strategy consisting of group discussion, collective research and real-time information sharing. [Smart Mobs]

I wrote about a similar story a while back. Imagine if we could harness this kind of collective commitment in the real world instead of just in games. Solve wicked problems in months instead of decades. But everyone is focusing on a different problem, it seems. Maybe a group should form and agree to order them and then tackle them one after the other. But this world's problems are not easy to state. Perhaps what we need to really get our act together is a threat that is imminent and really obvious to everyone.

[Seb's Open Research]

Groups of people using new technology are smarter than individuals. They are Smart Mobs, not the dumb ones of movies.  10:41:41 PM    

Why The Net Won't Dampen Record Sales. An anonymous coward sent in a link to this Guardian editorial saying that downloading music doesn't hurt music sales. Apparently, in the UK, music sales are actually up this year. The writer makes the two obvious comparisons that many people like to trot out these days. The first is that music sharing is similar to listening to the radio. It works as a promotional system that lets people discover new music that they can then spend money on. The second example is the always-popular "bottled water" example, where people still pay to buy bottled water even though the stuff from the tap is free. [Techdirt]

Value added is what they should be doing. DVDs are doing great because of the perceived value of all the added materials, along with the added convenience of a disk format.  9:29:19 PM    

Available: 250 GB hard disks. Western Digital today announced that it is shipping its next-generation 80 GB-per-platter technology, which yields PC hard drives that can store up to 250 GB. 120 BG disks cost about $150, while 250 GB cost $400; that's enough space for 30,000 respectively 60,000 CD-quality songs, or 10-20 days of non-stop music. By 2010, it's likely to be one thousand times more, i.e. one disk will have room for 30-60 years of non-stop music... or 40,000 DVD-quality movies. Copyright as we know it is dead. Opportunities abound. [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

What will happen to copyright when we can carry around the entire Library of Congress in our pocket? Remember, the money will be in providing the filtering AFTER works are published, not before, as is done today. To a certain extent, film festivals, like Sundance, do this. They take works that have already been created and find the good ones, which are then given big distribution monies. Publish then filter will be the way things work. Mavens, those that always find the newest thing first, will be important. Content companies that support mavens will be more successful. We will get there eventually.  9:26:30 PM    

Eloquence, and the American crisis. These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. —Thomas Paine [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

It is always sobering to read the wonderful words of men so much more eloquent than many today. Poetry.  9:21:40 PM    

The Age of Connection

David Weinberger has an important essay at Greater Democracy on the meaning of connections, the What that flows over the things people keep focusing on.

Until now, our connectedness has depended on centralized control points that have been the gatekeepers of our economic and political networks. To speak to everyone, you had to be one of the few with access to a broadcast networks. To sell to everyone, you had to be one of the few with access to a global distribution channel. To achieve office, you had to be one of the few with access to corporate coffers and national media....

We are not in the Information Age. We are not in the Age of the Internet. We are in the Age of Connection. To achieve the ideals this country was built on [~] equality, freedom of speech and thought, the basic fairness that let[base ']s people determine their own destinies [~] we need everyone connected to everyone else.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, too. Reread Democracy in America over the last week and it seems to me that, with the Bush Administration taking so many clumsily totalitarian steps toward the destruction of its political party, and with the Democrats in almost total disarray and cowering despite Bush's immense gaffes on the international and domestic fronts, it is time for just one thing: people must elect themselves to make a change.

It is a horrible prospect that the U.S., an immensely connected country, might become submerged by the limits on connections being imposed by the government (granting greater media consolidation a clear field for the final push toward One Big Voice; a spectrum as private property approach to wireless; Total Information Awareness; closing our borders and driving out students from overseas, etc., etc.).

Individuals need to rise up and sieze the power they have always had and been urged to forget. Beyond voting, we need to organize and actively debate everything, from the sidewalks in our home towns to the bills before Congress and the ad hoc rulings from the executive branch. We need a parallel government that forces the attention of politicians back to the people and away from the monied interests.

Why would this work? Because politicians go where the power is and money is merely a proxy for power and time (because you can buy people's time or their attention through broadcast media). An active populace, a Jacksonian revival, with a thousand Lincolns spinning homely leadership, and a thousand Dr. Kings igniting our indignation toward arbitrary exercises of power by something called "the majority" would erase the proxy power of lobbyists and career representatives of big contributors and drive the return of an American dialog.

We should use the connections to establish parallel governments at every level, until the governments adopt the dialog by default, which they will do, because American government is still by people and for people at its roots. There are good people in government, and a lot of snails and weasels, too. Give the dedicated civil servant and the earnest legislator a constituency and they can change things in weeks, even days. Decisions can and will be made based on the will of the people through informed and open debate.

In one of those coincidences, David Weinberger and I were exchanging email yesterday about the future of network communications. In it, David expressed real fear and lamented that we haven't seen our Dr. King, that we need one desperately.

In fact, we need 10,000 Martin Luther Kings, 10,000 Andrew Jacksons, 10,000 Abraham Lincolns, 10,000 Teddy Roosevelts, 10,000 H.L. Menckens, 10,000 Ida Tarbells, 10,000 Bobby Kennedys, 10,000 Thomas Jeffersons, 10,000 Ben Franklins, 10,000 Walt Whitmans, 10,000 Edward R. Murrows. And they should all be arguing with one another and with the "mainstream" thought leaders vociferously. We need what Tocqueville called "birthpangs in progress" to keep the nation astir in order to create as many new movements and collaborations and opportunities as possible.

With connections, we have the power to be the great country we are, but only if we break out of the bonds of waiting for information, waiting for an opportunity to talk, waiting for an opportunity to start a business, waiting for the next election to deal with our frustrations about what the government is doing and, then, only in the abstract. The United States was born in action and we need to return to that heritage NOW.

Because, the fact is, folks, we--Americans--have produced all of the preceding leaders before, despite the strictures on communications. We can do it today. If anything, the rise in self-employment and entrepreneurialism over the past decade has proven that this is practical in economic matters and can, with commitment, spread to the political dimensions of our life, as well.

We are Dr. King. We are George Washington. We can be anything we want as a nation and as a part of the world. If only we would take the reins, and they are hanging there now, untouched, because the Adminstration and political parties have decided to rely on Big media, markets and messages that treat us all as faceless and useless non-participants if we aren't waving hundred dollar bills when the rulers pass by.

 

[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing] [RatcliffeBlog -- Social and Political]

A very long quote but there are some very important things here. The new power will come from the bottom-up. We will not see a single Lincoln. Jackson and Sharton are trying to claim the leadership but it will not fit. As with the right, trying to claim that all the anti-war demonstrators are rupes of some sort of left-over Stalinist organization. Bottom-up organizations have points about which they crystalize, not necessarily charismatic leaders. The politicians that realize this have a chance of being leaders. But the great thing about America has always been that the bottom-up approach usually provides the leaders, not the other way around. King became a leader because a woman refused to move on a bus.  9:17:45 PM    

Job Boards Want Hourly Workers. Remember the old boom time commercials for online job boards? The ones where they suggested that by putting your resume online you could get your dream job within a matter of minutes? Well, now the job boards are realizing that not only do dream jobs not exist any more, neither do permanent office jobs. At least not enough of them to keep the job boards making money. As we mentioned recently, all of the various online job seeking companies are revving up their focus on hourly employees. The latest Super Bowl ads from those companies are expected to highlight those types of jobs, rather than the dream jobs of years past. [Techdirt]

People in all sorts of formerly salaried positions are now being paid hourly. Simply ask some of the employees of the former Immunex. Some companies are taking the approach that lack of loyalty means that everyone can be treated as expendable or fungible (one of my favorite words. from the Latin fungi- to perform). This is not a way to build creativity at companies that require innovation to survive but it seems to be the way some MBAs think. None of them are ever paid hourly.  9:13:16 PM    

The View from 2023. THE VIEW FROM 2023: WSJ.com Economists Failed to Predict Shift as the Poor Get Richer By J. BRADFORD DELONG It is extraordinary how few people back in, say, 2003, foresaw the economic changes that the past two decades have brought. I certainly did not. There were plenty of clues. Some visionaries said the biotechnology revolution was about to arrive. Others trumpeted the positive effects of computers and telecommunications. Economists like Dale Jorgenson, studying productivity growth, noted the rapid fall in... [Semi-Daily Journal]

A very nice article and it may not be too far from the truth. It will be the reaction of the US to the encursion of developing countries that will determine just how fast this all goes. If we view ANY attempt of these countries to enter the land of 'developed' country and perhaps threaten our hegemony as horrific, then it may be a lot later than 2023 before we see the golden age. I'll be 67 by then. I'm still optimistic.  8:48:01 PM    

Scrabbleface breaks story of new Chinese fossil find

Scrabbleface tells us about some new fossils from China that may very well hold the solution to the development of flight. At least it will do for the moment;-)  8:41:34 PM    

Biotech doesn't necessarily mean 'tech'. Seattle Times Jan 26 2003 12:01PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Great! There aren't jobs for those of us who actually work in biotech. Let's bring in somemore people to really get the unemployment up. What are they thinking? These companies are not hiring. They have little money and burn rates that will put them out of business in 12 months unless things turn around. Even if they did hire, why go work for one and be out of a job in a year? The big ones, like Amgen, Genentech, have more resumes than they can deal wtih.  8:27:02 PM    

GM cows to please cheese-makers [New Scientist]

But if all they did was take some bovine genes and create cows which expressed them to a higher level, they did not really do much. This is not like adding genes from a different kingdon (i.e. antibodies into tobacco plants) or antibiotic genes. You won't be eating the cows. You will be eating the cheese that will not contain anything that is genetically modified. It will just have more protein, protein that is already present in cheese. There are many other forms of GM foods to demonize but something like this is not one of them. At least if I read the report properly.  8:24:19 PM    

H. L. Mencken. "Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right." [Quotes of the Day]

Lester B. Pearson. "Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects." [Quotes of the Day]

Gore Vidal. "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so." [Quotes of the Day]

Richard Feynman. "There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." [Quotes of the Day]

A very nice collection.  2:14:15 PM    

The Medium-Term Outlook for the World Economy: Five Questions That Need Answering. The Medium-Term Outlook for the World Economy: Five Questions That Need Answering What one thinks about the medium-term future of the world economy depends on the answers one gives to five questions about productivity growth: 1. Rapid American productivity growth has continued through the recession. What conclusions should we draw from this? This question has two possible answers. The first answer is that changes in America's labor market have eliminated the old pattern by which firms tried to hold onto... [Semi-Daily Journal]

Some very good questions that should provoke some good discussions.  2:00:06 PM    

An editorial in Thursday's Economist argues for a .... An editorial in Thursday's Economist argues for a 14 year copyright term, renewable once, the rule in force at the time of the adoption of the U.S. constitution. This victory for the public domain should be balanced by a victory for the content industry in the form of strong DRM backed by laws prohibiting its circumvention. After conceding that both sides in today's copyright wars have merit (piracy is harming the content industry, but the response is harming the public domain), the editorial makes this argument: "Over the past 50 years, as a result of heavy lobbying by content industries, copyright has grown to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas....Starting from scratch today, no rational, disinterested lawmaker would agree to copyrights that extend to 70 years after an author's death, now the norm in the developed world....The flood of free content on the internet has shown that most creators do not need incentives that stretch across generations. To reward those who can attract a paying audience, and the firms that support them, much shorter copyrights would be enough." [FOS News]

This is so reasonable but will it ever happen? I am not holding my breath.  1:23:09 PM    

The Beauty of the Worm. A posting from Peter Kaminski to a mailing list (with permission): It's a thing of terrorbeauty, this Slammer/Sapphire/W32.SQLExp.Worm. Weighing in at 376 bytes of assembly language code, it is shorter than some email signature blocks. Shorter than the next paragraph. It fits entirely within one UDP packet. The packet goes into a Microsoft SQL Server box, and boom, the machine turns into a zombie, spewing the same packet back out at random IP addresses, over and over and over and over, running in a tight 23-instruction loop, cycling fast enough to fill the network it's connected to with the... [Joho the Blog]

A little more discussion of the worm that caused so much havoc yesterday. It only affected MS SQL servers.   1:22:14 PM    

Comic relief of sorts, at Microsoft's expense. The laugh's on Microsoft, but we are all losing due to their domination of networks and the nuts and bolts of the Internet. [Mac Net Journal]

Poetic justice. MS has a new patch so often that it is a full time job just to keep them up to daye. I love that MS own servers were hit.  1:17:31 PM