Ok, so this has absolutely nothing to do with computers, the interenet and pc security; but, you got to admit, it’s one cool machine.
Super Snake: Shelby To Create Bigger ‘Stang With Longer Fangs and 725 Hp?
Read more at ShadowPuterDude
Large swaths of garbled human DNA once dismissed as junk appear to contain some valuable sections, according to a new study by researchers at the School of Medicine and the UC-Santa Cruz. The scientists propose that this redeemed DNA plays a role in controlling when genes turn on and off.
Gill Bejerano, PhD, assistant professor of developmental biology and of computer science at Stanford, found more than 10,000 nearly identical genetic snippets dotting the human chromosomes. Many of those snippets were located in gene-free chromosomal expanses once described by geneticists as “gene deserts.” These sections are, in fact, so clogged with useful DNA bits – including the ones Bejerano and his colleagues describe – that they’ve been renamed “regulatory jungles.”
“It’s funny how quickly the field is now evolving,” Bejerano said. His work is picking out these snippets and describing why they might exist was published in the April 23 advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It turns out that most of the segments described in the research paper cluster near genes that play a carefully orchestrated role during an animal’s first few weeks after conception. Bejerano and his colleagues think that these sequences help in the intricate choreographyof when and where those genes flip on as the animal lays out its body plan. In particular, the group found the sequences to be especially abundant near genes that help cells stick together. These genes play a crucial role early in an animal’s life, helping cells migrate to the correct location or form into organs and tissues of the correct shape.
The 10,402 sequences studied by Bejerano, along with David Haussler, PhD, professor of biomolecular engineering at UC-Santa Cruz, are remnants of unusual DNA pieces called transposons that duplicate themselves and hop around the genome. “We used to [...]
Read more at jillian
Beware of the mad scientist…A techie (or company) who peddles the hopes of saving a business a lot of money by offering a solution with either inferior hardware and/or recommending an open source software solution. By inferior hardware, I mean using hardware that does not suit a company’s needs. In theory, a company with 50 users could use a PC with a 1GHz processor and 512MG of RAM, as a Peer-to-Peer central file server, but this really would not be an adequate solution. The mantra that you should always be repeating when faced with the decision of implementing a new IT solution is “you get what you pay for”. How often does that simple phrase come back to haunt the unfortunate company that decides not to heed its simple warning? You will always, and I mean always, pay more in the long run for these home grown solutions. Whether it be during the installation, where a techie will be paid hourly to work out all of the bugs and tweak their solution for your specific environment, or for the long term woes that come from the lack of support with the eventual home-grown solution. This will also include the loss of money which often results from the lack of user productivity, not to mention the complaints and hit in employee confidence you will soon encounter by taking the low road.
Read more at ivanr
Computer hardware security, IT security Management, Networking security, Security software, Server security
I installed the Google Desktop for Mac Beta a few weeks ago. My computer has dragged ever since… really dragged… there was lag switching between apps and windows – and even lag typing sometimes! It took me a while to confidently pin point Google Desktop as the culprit, but in the end it was clear that the background processes were routinely taking up 50% or more of my processing power… to say nothing of the RAM, virtual memory, and harddrive space it consumed. I uninstalled it just now and all seems to be back to normal. I’m usually a fan of cool new Google apps, but this one gets an “F” grade from me this time out. An index is no good to me if it makes my computer frustrating to use. (And this was on my less than 1 year old MacBook with 2 GB of RAM and almost 4 GB of free harddrive space… I can’t imagine what it would do to most school computers.) In any case, I don’t recommend it.
Read more at Mark Wagner
This post marks the beginning of a new daily trend here. Over the past several weeks I was posting “one-page” overviews of each section of my dissertation lit review. Now that I’ve begun fleshing out those sections, I have more material to post – complete with quotes and citations. I’ve already posted two of the sections in their long form as word documents, but now I’ll be posting brief (blog post length) excerpts each day.
This is the first part of the Engagement and Motivation section of my dissertation lit review:
One of the fundamental properties of an effective constructivist learning environment is that it engages and motivates students.
Engaging and motivating students has been a primary concern of the constructivist movement since long before computers and video games. Now, though, modern complex video games offer a new multi-modal medium for engaging students and a wide variety of new strategies for motivating their participation.
For more than a century, traditional classroom lessons – including lectures, reading, and written assignments – have often failed to effectively or reliably engage and motivate students. As Dewey (1938) noted, many students come to “associate the learning process with ennui and boredom” (p. 27), and as Slator (2006) explained, these “uninspired students often create difficulties for instructors and themselves” (p. 10).
In recent decades, video games (and other interactive media) may have exacerbated this problem. Students, particularly gamers, are now coming to school with higher expectations of engagement and interaction. Papert (1993), a student of Piaget, made the argument that video games encourage in students “an industriousness and eagerness that school can seldom generate” (p. 3-4) and that “school strikes many young people as slow, boring, and frankly out of touch” (p. 5).
Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants
Prensky (2001b) introduced the metaphor of digital natives and digital immigrants, in [...]
Read more at Mark Wagner
This company uses BlackBerries for remote e-mail and also allows remote e-mail access via the Web, reports a pilot fish working there. User call to help desk: Does my new BlackBerry have Internet access? Help desk tech: Yes, it does. User: Then can you set up a bookmark for the Web-mail site on my BlackBerry? Sighs fish, "The tech asked if she was having problems receiving mail on the BlackBerry. After a pause, the user responded, ‘Oh, I guess that was a dumb request’ and hung up."
Read more at ivanr
Computer hardware security, IT security Management, Mobile/Wireless
A comment on a recent post on this blog invoked The Other in the context of UCT. It’s a concept about which many assumptions are made – who holds the centre, who is relegated to the margins – and, depending on one’s own positionality, perspectives differ.
My own assumptions about the centrality of white men were blown apart when an academic in one of the Blessed Disciplines confessed that he’d always felt marginalised because of his class roots. Another admitted similar feelings based on his discipline – given the neoliberal deification of Science, Engineering and Technology that had sprung up within the University, he felt his field tainted him as "dead wood" despite his active research profile and empassioned teaching. And, of late, the policy thrust which has embraced the discourse of equity and redress has seen many white men feeling threatened, superfluous, endangered.
The black staff who are the intended beneficiaries of many of these policies feel no more affirmed or empowered – many question the commitment of the institution to enacting these policies as they continue to see around them the appointment, promotion and affirmation of those traditionally affirmed. Skepticism at best; outright suspicion and hostility at worst.
Neither women as a group, nor people with disabilities, see their identity reflected back at them when viewing the institution. They still feel the need to adapt, compromise, suppress, mask – which has, some claim, gotten worse in recent times rather than better, with the heightened focus on performativity which makes unreasonable demands of the kind best borne by those who have wives, servants, Others to pick up in the domestic sphere when their attention needs to be focused increasingly above and beyond working hours on putting in extra just to stay afloat.
So… if we all feel Other, who feels [...]
Read more at Vicki Scholtz
Oh, see, that’s not good. From our colleagues Down Under at Computerworld Australia:
A French security researcher has revealed a flaw in the handling of Bitmap files within Adobe Systems Inc.’s Photoshop program that can lead to an exploit of a user’s system. According to the researcher, known as Marsu, a buffer overflow in Adobe products can be triggered while processing a malformed BMP, DIB or RLE file. Affected programs include Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3, says the researcher. The exploit was tested against the French edition of Windows XP SP2. Danish security research company Secunia said the solution is simple: "Do not open untrusted Bitmap files."
Read more at ivanr
Click here to listen/download 11:13).
Jonathan Young, EarthLink’s VP of Security Software, Subscription and Services, talks about expanding anti-phishing protection services for its customers. We also hear from Diana Kelley, VP and Service Director, Burton Group, about the PCI Data Security Standard and how businesses are responding to this "cookbook" of guidance. She also takes part in RSA’s 5-part PCI Perspectives 2007 Web Seminar Series this week.
Read more at blog@rsa.com (Podcast Producers)
We’ve all suffered from lost time and lost connections because of false positives from necessary spam filters. Just this morning, board members of a non-profit I volunteer for were complaining to me that email to board members gets trapped as spam, and while working on this blog I nearly lost an email that was treated as a false positive.
But some businesses lose more than time. Open source advocate Ryan Bagueros, who does consulting around web developer and open source (his firms are northxsouth and Linefeed) told me lots of promising social networking companies are stymied because the emails they send members and prospective members get trapped by spam filters–especially at the major email hosting sites.
I find this ironic, because the social networking sites are structured networks that promise ultimately to be a replacement for email: richer with identifying information, more secure, and full of features to build relationships and communities. Yet to get off the ground, the sites depend on email, the only universal online medium, in all its primitiveness. And the sites suffer because of it.
Bagueros knows a couple ways to avoid having social network sites filtered as spam. Some email host services offer free whitelisting, but others depend on third-party whitelisters that charge email senders an initial fee of several thousand dollars plus ongoing assessments.
Another approach is to expend a lot of sweat complying with the dozen requirements set up by the major email hosting services. Yet Bagueros writes, “you will still experience periods of non-deliverability as your outbound volume increases.”
A contrasting approach is to “subvert the filters,” by putting some junk text at the bottom of each email and faking with some mail headers. This, however, violates terms of services and can even get the sender sued. He points out that the particular mail server you [...]
Read more at Andy Oram
I mentioned a new ONLamp feature in last week’s Linux Newsletter (and if you don’t get the newsletter, full of my sparkling wit and charm, as well as a summary of the articles and blogs for the week, why don’t you?). The ONLamp Ombudsman will work to resolve those pesky questions to the Ombudsman (which is my secret identity…), and he’ll work to track down the answers.
Had an annoying PHP bug that no one on the mailing list seems to have an answer for? Been trying to figure out how to do something in MySQL, but no one has a clue? Tired of rhetorical questions? Send those problems to the ONLamp Ombudsman (in care of turner at oreilly.com, with OMBUDSMAN in the subject, guess it’s not much of a secret identity, eh?), and I’ll… I mean he’ll try to find the answers to a select few. Let the awesome power of the ONLamp Ombudsman, second only to the Israeli Army, work for you!
Read more at James Turner
Less than nine months after SurfControl bought BlackSpider, it seems that Websense is buying SurfControl.
Wow. Consolidation still rampant in the anti-spam market, eh?
BlackSpider is an email- and Web-filtering service. Variously described as "managed", "hosted", "on demand", or "in the cloud", the service competes with the bigger fish such as MessageLabs, Postini, and Microsoft — the service it acquired with FrontBridge.
Read more at ivanr