Here is the question of the day… When typing, do you prefer a double or single space after a period? I personally prefer a single space. I see no reason for a double space, and neither APA nor MLA formats call for it. I think it is merely an extr keystroke, and wasted space. What do you think? Take the poll, and feel free to leave a comment.
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.
HANG ’EM ALL — COMPLETELY!
by Frank R. Zindler
All over our country – in the north as well as the south – the battle cry is “Hang Ten!” Ten Commandments, that is. Clergymen, judges, governors, and legislatures have echoed the call. The states are beginning to command by fiat of law that the primitive taboos recorded in the Hebrew bible be displayed on courthouse lawns, in judicial chambers, in halls of legislative assemblies, and in public schools.
Everywhere the claim is made that America was founded on the Ten Commandments – or at least that its system of law and justice is based on that biblical code. Not even the Chief Justice of the United States seems to realize that our governmental system represents a reaction to the principles inherent in that code – in some cases a mighty rejection of that code.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution, for example, is an eloquent repudiation of the First Commandment’s prohibition of religious freedom. It is also a repudiation of the Third Commandment’s prohibition of freedom of speech.
The Thirteenth Amendment repudiates the institution of slavery which is so cozily assumed by the Fourth and Tenth Protestant Commandments.
Consider: what could be more American than the principle that every person is to be held accountable for his or her crimes only? Could anything be more un-American than the Second Commandment’s warning that “I Yahweh, thy God, am a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation…”? Not even the Common Law would have hung a man because his grandfather had stolen a horse! The Second Commandment (conveniently not enumerated in Catholic epitomes of the “Decalogue”) also prohibits the making of “any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth.” That would rule out all representational art – including dollar bills that bear the likeness of George Washington! What could be more American than Greenbacks? Yet Chief Justice William Rehnquist seems still to cling to his 1980 opinion that “The secular application of the Ten Commandments is clearly seen in its adoption as the fundamental legal code of Western Civilization and the Common Law of the United States.” [Stone v Graham, 449 US 39.101 S. Ct. 192.66 L.Ed. 2d 199 (1980)]
The hanging of the Ten Commandments is fraught with problems never considered by the pandering politicians who so eagerly rush to collect the votes of their most superstitious constituents. For example, there is never any discussion as to which of the three sets of Ten Commandments the Bible claims to be “it” should be used. Nor is there any discussion as to which epitome of any one of these sets should be used: Jewish, Protestant, or Catholic. It is blithely assumed that all theists should be happy with their “Hang-Ten” efforts. Yet it is hard to imagine “idolatrous Catholics” being happy with a public monument displaying a Protestant commandment prohibiting their cultic peculiarities. Nor does it seem that Jews could be happy with plaques writing out the whole word “God” – regardless of which set or version is engraved upon the plaque. Orthodox Jews, be it remembered, have a taboo against “uttering” the name of their deity. The prohibition in Leviticus 24:16 (“Whoever utters the Name of the Lord shall be put to death”) is taken very seriously. Not only do they not write out fully their god’s proper name -Yahweh – they avoid it wherever possible. Just as with Protestant and Catholic versions of the Ten Commandments, the Jewish English versions substitute the word “Lord” for the heap-big-medicine name “Yahweh.” In fact, the Orthodox go to the absurd extreme of writing “G-d” for “God” – which Christians fearlessly spell out in its capitalized entirety. Certainly it will shock the sensibilities of Jewish constituents to see public displays that spell “God” with a vowel.
In addition to the problems of which set of commandments to display and whose epitomized versions to enumerate, there is a further problem never considered by the politicians: What are the commandments supposed to mean, and whose interpretations are to be granted state backing? Is the commandment that prohibits “bearing false witness” against one’s neighbor a rule for behavior in a court of law, or is it a prohibition of lying or gossiping? Are the prohibitions against “coveting” injunctions against envy, or are they (as some anthropologists claim) a ban against use of the “evil eye”? Is “Thou shalt not kill” a universal ban on killing – of flies and flamingoes as well as fetuses or Fascists – or is it a prohibition of murder? What is murder?
A Modest Proposal
Considering the above-mentioned problems, it seems to me the only solution to the problem of hanging commandments is this: hang them all! Hang all three sets in full text – don’t hang just the epitomes. Make sure they are the best English translations possible, rendering the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH as “Yahweh,” not the namby-pamby “Lord” of nearly all current translations. (Political correctness would make it advisable for a Spanish-language version be mounted also, wherever Hispanic votes are a force to be reckoned with.) Then, so the probable meaning of the texts can be inferred, mount other biblical verses that seem to clarify Yahweh’s intentions on the three occasions when he asked Moses to report the “Big Ten.” We should mount all the commandments in adjacent chapters in Exodus and Deuteronomy so the full context can be understood by the average school child or visitor to a courthouse.
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Politics Explained
FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all of the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.
BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and put them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as the regulations say you need.
FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.
PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.
CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and shoots you.
DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.
PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.
BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
PURE ANARCHY: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to take the cows and kill you.
LIBERTARIAN/ANARCHO-CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
10 – You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.
9 – You feel insulted and “dehumanized” when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.
8 – You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.
7 – Your face turns purple when you hear of the “atrocities” attributed to Allah, but you don’t even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in “Exodus” and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in “Joshua” including women, children, and trees!
6 – You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.
5 – You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old.
4 – You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs — though excluding those in all rival sects – will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most “tolerant” and “loving.”
3 – While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in “tongues” may be all the evidence you need to “prove” Christianity.
2 – You define 0.01% as a “high success rate” when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God.
1 – You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history – but still call yourself a Christian.
