Life is a Journey, Why Not Share it?

Why is it that religious zealots always give god credit for the good things, but never the bad? Seems one sided, don’t you think?

This is a great cross post from FAILBlog. The reporter seems to make an honest enough mistake, but it sure makes the story a lot more funny.

Attorneys are seeking to halt teaching of a song they call a “blatantly sectarian and proselytizing religious song” to third-graders at The Webster School until the case can go to court.

This is the second time in less than a month that attorneys asked the United States District Court in Jacksonville for a preliminary injunction to stop a song at Webster.

School district officials said they knew nothing about the amended complaint until contacted by The St. Augustine Record Tuesday evening.

“Our attorney (Frank Upchurch) had not heard of it. No one knew about it,” said Margie Davidson, spokeswoman for the St. Johns County School District.

Attempts to reach Superintendent Joe Joyner were unsuccessful.

The amended complaint, filed Tuesday, comes less than a week after a federal judge ruled the School District, a school principal and two teachers violated two students’ First Amendment rights by making them choose between practicing what he called a “proselytizing” and “sectarian” country music song for an end-of-the-year assembly or sitting out the performance.

The song was “In God We Still Trust,” released in 2005 by Diamond Rio. Two parents and their third-graders filed a lawsuit in protest in March.

The teachers and principal said in affidavits the children were told participation in the assembly was voluntary and the children did not have to sing the song.

The case still must go to trial.

On Tuesday attorneys Bill Sheppard and Gray Thomas sought another preliminary injunction for a second tune also being taught to third-graders at Webster. They’re asking the judge to order the school to stop having the pupils sing the song until the judge can decided if they should be prohibited from learning it in school.

Theyre also asking the judge to rule, as in the first case, that their constitutional rights were violated by making them either learn a song that runs counter to their religious beliefs or be ostracized by their classmates.

This injunction request named the school board, Joyner, the principal and three teachers, including the music teacher.

At issue this time is the music teacher’s introduction of “Chatter With the Angels,” a song the suit calls “sectarian” and “proselytizing.”

The suit claims directing the students to rehearse or perform the “Chatter” song constitutes “retaliation against Plaintiffs for their having instituted” the case for “In God We Trust.”

The injunction ruling came April 15. Webster began teaching the song on April 20, according to the amended complaint.

Read more

13,000 offer up DNA to put their genomes online

Study among first to offer data to computer scientists

Lucas Mearian

May 18, 2009 (Computerworld) Since opening to the public late last month, The Personal Genome Project has signed up 13,000 volunteers who will donate genetic material for the benefit of gene research worldwide. Information about the genetic material will also be posted online.

The project was launched last year with the goal of creating the world’s first publicly accessible database of human genomic and trait data from 100,000 people. Initially, it started as a closed test study with 10 volunteers so that those who later sign up for the project “will know what they’re getting into,” said George Church, the Harvard Medical School professor leading the initiative.

Those first 10 volunteers had their genomes, along with photos and personal and family history, placed online as a pilot for the experiment, which one day could include millions of unique genomes.

Church said study participants have not been promised any anonymity — just the opposite.

Participants are schooled on the fact that their private medical data, including any diseases or deformities, will be available for the world to view. And while Church acknowledged that will initially scare a some people off. But once people have gotten used to the idea of participating in medical research, “it’s a fairly small additional step to say, ‘Let’s allow anyone at all to take a look at it.’

“We don’t need that many people to enroll. One hundred thousand people out of 6.5 billion is a very tiny number of people,” Church said.

The purpose of the public genome database is to offer up genetic information to the world’s scientific community, including computer scientists, for the study of hereditary medical issues, according to Church. The project is among the first to allow researchers other than traditional medical doctors to use the data.

“I think there’s a lot of opportunity for someone who looks at things differently to make connections that the so-called experts missed,” he said. “So we’re very excited about having participation of computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists and so forth.”

Church believes that within a few years, everyone will have the opportunity to keep their own genome data — and personal medical information — in a personally-controlled electronic record. That valuable information becomes even more valuable when it can be shared with the scientific community in general.

“…If everyone shares, then suddenly it adds value to the resources everyone already has,” he said.

The Personal Genome Project will focus initially on medical research. For example, Church and his team are interested in morphological characteristics, such as what makes a person’s face the shape that it is.

“That doesn’t sound like it’s immediately medical, but things about morphology can affect whether you have sleeping or breathing problems,” Church said. “We’re trying not to be prejudicial in deciding in advance what’s medical or not because there are opportunities for serendipity and holistic interconnections that computers can find that people may have missed because they’re not as good at finding correlations.”

To date, scientists have discovered 1,450 genes that are considered predictive of hereditary disease and that are actionable. That means a person with the genes can be treated medically if given enough warning or they can make a lifestyle change to make them less susceptible to illness, Church said.

The project targets families that have had diseases or abnormalities since their data will be of more use in finding genetic links. According to Church, older volunteers get priority because they’ve had more life history and more medical incidents.

Volunteers who sign up to have their genetic material tested must first answer a detailed questionnaire and demonstrate that they understand that their private information will be made very public. They will then be asked to give genetic material, such as hair, blood, skin or saliva, from which their genome will be extracted.

While volunteers won’t have their names published with their genomic information, Church said the subjects are completely aware that anyone familiar with them can deduct from the photos and background information who they are.

A genome represents a full set of chromosomes — or the complete genetic sequence — of a human being, half of which come from the father and half from the mother. The genetic sequence represents 6 billion base pairs of nucleotides — complementary DNA strands — connected by hydrogen bonds.

A microsopic look at X and Y chromosomes that make up a genome.

The X & Y Chromosomes that make up a Genome

In order to store the research data, one byte of capacity is required for each base pair. As a result, 6GB of data capacity is needed to store the genetic information of just one person, according to Church.

To address the scalability required for such a database, the project has turned to Web 2.0 technology and crowd sourcing. In other words, the project is being offered to the worldwide community of developers and technology vendors. For example, Isilon Systems Inc. stepped up to offer network-attached storage (NAS) clusters as primary storage for the project.

Church said Harvard went with NAS clusters because traditional monolithic storage arrays with RAID 5 protection is becoming less reliable for research where data grows exponentially. “We’re starting to see solutions at that scale start to fail on a very regular basis,” he said, “meaning you get two simultaneous disk failures and then lose whole data set.”

Eventually, Church said he envisions millions of volunteers participating in the Personal Genome Project, requiring a highly scalable infrastructure. For just the current database with data on 10 people, the project is using 100 servers and a three-node Isilon IQ 12000x cluster.

The success of the project is highly dependent on how well the crowd-sourcing model works and which companies step forward to offer up technology for research. Church said Google has also offered “significant gifts,” as has Amazon, which offered to host the data on its cloud storage offering.

Church said he expects The Personal Genome Project to have its 100,000 volunteers by the end of the year, even though not all of those participants will have been processed by that time.

“We’re trying to build a model where even if only 100,000 out of 6.5 billion share, it’s enough to benefit all 6 billion,” he said.

This is just hilarious, though I am sure it was no where near as funny for the soldiers who were doing the test firing.

TACOMA, Wash. — Ted Mazetier may be a grandfather, but at 84 years old, he’s still got his chops.

And two men learned that the hard way.

Mazetier was driving down South Proctor Street Wednesday night when he spotted a car on the curb and two guys standing nearby. He thought they needed help, so he stopped.

But as soon as he pulled over, the two men pounced.

“The guy comes over to my car, and unfortunately my window was open, because he cold-cocked me. I mean, just sucker-punched me. Just bam!” Mazetier said.

The punch left quite a shiner on Mazetier.

“It hurts. It hurts right now,” he said.

But he wasn’t about to take a beating sitting down.

You see, Mazetier is a World War II veteran who also happened to spend his entire career watching over criminals imprisoned in the U.S. penal system. In short, he can handle trouble.

“When I opened the door, he started toward me and I kicked him in the balls,” he said.

When the other man charged, Mazetier put his feet up and kicked him in the belly.

“He kind of bent a little and went down. And I went around the guy and I’m in the street, and I’m waving for cars to stop and, you know, help.”

The two men fled, not having gotten whatever they were looking for.

Moments later, a passerby came to Mazetier’s aid. That person had happened to get a glimpse of the fleeing men, and described them to police.

“And so the next thing I know, I was in the hospital and when the cops came in the hospital – the same ones that interviewed me – they said, ‘We got ‘em.’ And I said, ‘Thank God.’” Mazetier said.

Tacoma police believe the same two men assaulted another victim earlier in the evening in the same part of town.

Mazetier is recovering, still dealing with the shiner and the shock.

“It’s wrong. It’s absolutely wrong,” he said.