Jagarsi

The old dude Jagarsi who has been faithfully serving our lab for the past x years (where x= a big number) is finally retiring due to a heart condition. So the department decided to have a farewell lunch for him. Unfortunately, the dude was sick that day and in hospital and couldn't make it for his own farewell lunch. But the lunch had to go on anyway. Its like the birthday boy missing from the birthday party. Sad huh.
Anyway, went to the Rice Table at Suntec. Decent place serving Indonesian food. The whole department went, the attendance sheet officially stating 71 participants. We came, sat down and waited a long time before being served. They had a choice of lime, orange or sour plum juice: all freeflow. Then came the keropok freeflow. What we dicussed and decided was that the people there were knaves who try to make us drink lots of liquids and then give us lots of keropok so that the keropok expands in the stomach with the fruit juice so we can't eat much later on.
The waiters later came with rice, which everybody took very little of, and then the food in nice identical dishes. About 12-13 varieties. Let me try and remember:

Soto ayam (not the best I've tasted)
pickled cucumber (prof likes it)
Rojak buah (prof says its ok)
curry chicken wing (didn't finish the first serving)
sweet black sauce chicken (so-so)
sayur lemak (ordered twice)
tahu telur (TOO OILY!!!)
satay ayam (yum, the thick sweet peanut sauce)
rendang (I personally ate two servings of it)
curry prawn (a favourite)
lady's finger (not bad)
sweet and sour fish (good)
kangkung belacan (good)
otak otak (so-so)


...hmmm....about 14, but have this feeling I missed out one or two.
Anyway, half way through the feast, the HOD gave a speech on how much money in grants the dept has got and how well we are all working and how much harder we must work now, etc. etc.
Then we got back to eating.
But I pitty the people sitting at the HOD's table. Can't enjoy a good lunch. Coz the people there will be too paiseh to eat alot and scared if they order more, the HOD think they glutton or something, and so pretend to be full after the first strand of kangkung.
But my table boh kiek kee. Order the prawns 4 times, satay 3 times, salad, fish, otak...everything take second round, and finish up all. We all is high performance one. Muahahaha....


Ok, ok, pictures:


Nice ambiance:






The ploy:


Why so few choices?


The spread:




Josie's first round:


Soto ayam:


My second round:


Bhu refuses to finish up the curry:


The HOD's table; sorry guys, no second rounds:


Ahhemm....




Escape!:


Trying to fit back a broken branch:






After lunch, we still had an hour to roam around suntec before the bus came to pick us back to campus:


Two of the staffs decided to get a haircut, and the whole department was outside watching... the poor hairdresser, must have been super stressed:


Yup, like I said, the WHOLE department watching one guy get his hair cut:

New air conds

After the central air cond failed some time back, the pressure on the window units found at the general heavy equiptment lab increased. The frequent breakdowns of the air conds caused many in the lab to break sweat. Thus, the department had no choice but to fix the air conds. So the day came when workers lined up outside the yellow doors:


Workers in the general equiptment area. They had to open up the false ceiling, take out the old air cond ducts, put in new air cond ducts, made a mess of the whole place.


The old air cond ducts. Someone should culture some of that stuff on petri dishes. Could open a zoo I think...


The new Mr.Slim Mitsubishi units. I guess its a 2.5 horsepower. There were 4 units installed. Supposedly they are going to close the doors that lead from the main lab corridor to this general lab area. So the corridor will still be hot while the general lab will be freezing antarctica.

Old shaking incubators

The 4 old controled thermal shakers have been taken away. To replace it next month, there will be 3 new units of the Sartorious coming in. Those new units will be stackable and half the size of the old ones, so it will only occupy the same footspace as ONE old unit. Talk of real estate potential! The workers seemed to have a hard time getting the old units out. They were sweating and toiling, maybe partly because of the faulty central air cond. hahah.... free sauna.

First unit:


First unit gone, second one waiting in turn:


Second unit:


No. 3 and No.4:


After all 4 were gone, we decided to rearrange the chest freezers to widen the walking space:

Photo

Realized that the photo put up yesterday couldnt distinguish the numbers on the yellow asset number clearly, so here's a pic of the pic from the booklet:

blasphemy

The uni is trying to raise funds by asking everybody out there to give them money in exchange for renaming things after them. If you give them 2-30 million, they will name a building after you and if you give above 25 million, they will rename a school / faculty after you.
Thus, I have decided to save money to give to the uni, in a few years time, when I accumulate $100Million dollars, I will give it to the uni so they will rename NUS as National University of Sam. MUahahahahahah!!!! Then I will hike school fees by 30% each year and everybody that enters the uni will get stright A's no matter what you do or score in exams, just so long you dont complain about the fee hike. Muahhahah!!!!

As always, the uni has a unique way of messing things up.
Take a look at this picture, from the prestigious flavilab center:
An inverted microscope with the yellow asset number tag at the top.


Take a look at the propaganda brochure the uni came up with. They try to mimic the Mastercard 'priceless' advert some time ago.
Cover:


First page:


Some middle page:


Research excellence, yadda yadda yadda:


But wait, what's this!!!


Is that a pic from our lab? Lets read the caption:


What the....
O & G????
Ok, maybe OnG has a microscope EXACTLY like ours, same model, same monitor, and even same corner of the wall.
But on closer inspection, notice the yellow asset number? Its exactly the same.
Then, of course I'm wrong! I'm sure OnG has a microscope with the same asset number as microbiology.
How silly of me to accuse the makers of the brochure to NOT give credit to whom credit is due.

Pollutioin

Heard this saying today. Don't know how true it is.

The solution to pollution is dilution.

Think about it. So may ways to argue both for and against it.

Broken hearts

Feb 14, 2006
Be careful, a broken heart can kill you
Severe emotional or work stress can trigger heart attacks in healthy people
By Salma Khalik
HEALTH CORRESPONDENT

ON A day devoted to affairs of the heart, here's a bit of sobering news: A broken heart CAN kill.
So, too, can a surprise party... if there's a little too much of a surprise in it. There is truth to the phrase, 'scared to death'.

And that old chestnut, 'you're being worked to death'? That's possible too.

With Valentine's Day today, comes a timely warning from cardiologists at the National University Hospital (NUH): Severe emotional or work stress can trigger heart attacks in otherwise healthy people.
And their study of seven such patients, along with several others conducted by other cardiac centres, seems to confirm what men have long suspected: Women's hearts break more easily.

Women account for more than nine in 10 of these emotional heart attacks, the studies have revealed.

But it is not all bad news.

They also give the answer to that question posed in the popular song, How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?

Time, apparently, does the trick.

A 'heartbreak' attack is different from a 'regular' heart attack, which is usually caused by blocked arteries that restrict blood flow to the rest of the body.

A heart attack induced by emotion or stress, on the other hand, is triggered by a surge of hormones, which causes only the top part of the heart to contract, thus reducing blood flow.

This phenomenon was first discovered by Japanese researchers in 2001.

They called it 'tako tsubo' because, in such an attack, only the top part of the heart contracts, giving it the shape of an octopus trap with a round bottom and narrow neck - called tako tsubo in Japanese.

But time can help the victims of heartbreak - physically, as well as emotionally.

Rush the victim to hospital. If he - or more likely, she - gets there in time, the chances are very good that, within a month, the heart will have recovered its resilience, resulting in a full recovery and no side-effects from the attack.

Senior cardiologist Tan Huay Cheem, one of the researchers in the NUH study, said: 'We have come across cases like this before, but we thought it was caused by a very small clot which disintegrated.'

These victims tend to have typical heart attack symptoms, such as chest pains.

When doctors investigate, they find none of the classic problems, such as blocked or narrow arteries.

Now, when they do an angiogram on the patient and see the heart in the tako tsubo shape, they know they merely need to support the organ till it gets back to normal.

This is done with a balloon pump which helps the heart push blood to the rest of the body.

A study by the Sheba Medical Centre in Israel found that the tako tsubo syndrome caused 2 per cent of all heart attacks in that country, but 6 per cent of those in women.

A study by Johns Hopkins University in the United States found that, of 19 patients who had suffered attacks related to emotion and stress, about half were triggered by news of the death of someone close.

Other causes included surprise parties, armed robbery and even a fear of public speaking.

'The potentially lethal consequences of emotional stress,' the study concluded, 'are deeply rooted in folk wisdom, as reflected by phrases such as 'scared to death' and 'a broken heart'.'

salma@sph.com.sg

Do not think

Science 17 February 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5763, p. 935
DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5763.935

News of the Week

PSYCHOLOGY:
Tough Decision? Don't Sweat It

Greg Miller

Buying oven mitts and buying a car demand completely different types of decision-making. Most people would scarcely think about the mitts and agonize over the car. That's exactly the wrong way to go about it, according to a provocative new study.

On page 1005, Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands report a series of experiments with student volunteers and real-life shoppers that suggests that too much contemplation gets in the way of good decision-making--especially when the choice is complicated. Conscious deliberation is best suited for simple decisions such as choosing oven mitts, the researchers argue, whereas complex decisions like picking a car are best handled by the unconscious mind.

"They're elegant experiments with a simple design and eye-popping result," says Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The research should "stimulate some useful new thinking" among decision researchers, says Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University.

The problem with conscious thought, Dijksterhuis contends, is that you can only think about so many things at the same time. He hypothesized that decisions that require evaluating many factors may be better handled by unconscious thought processes.

To test the idea, Dijksterhuis and colleagues asked volunteers to read brief descriptions of four hypothetical cars and pick the one they'd like to buy after mulling it over for 4 minutes. The researchers made the decision far simpler than it is in real life by limiting the descriptions to just four attributes such as good gas mileage or poor legroom. One of the cars had more plusses than the others, and most participants chose this car. But when the researchers made the decision more complex by listing 12 attributes for each car, people identified the best car only about 25% of the time--no better than chance. The real surprise came when the researchers distracted the participants with anagram puzzles for 4 minutes before asking for their choices. More than half picked the best car. The counterintuitive conclusion, Dijksterhuis says, is that complex decisions are best made without conscious attention to the problem at hand.

To test the idea in a more natural setting, the researchers visited two stores: the international furniture store IKEA and a department store called Bijenkorf. A pilot study with volunteer subjects had suggested that shoppers weigh more attributes when buying furniture than when buying kitchen accessories and other simple products commonly purchased at Bijenkorf. The researchers quizzed shoppers at the two stores about how much time they'd spent thinking about their purchases and then called them a few weeks later to gauge their satisfaction. Bijenkorf shoppers who spent more time consciously deliberating their choices were more pleased with their purchases--evidence that conscious thought is good for simple decisions, Dijksterhuis says. But at IKEA, the reverse was true: Those who reported spending less time deliberating turned out to be the happiest.

Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, says the study builds on evidence that too much reflection is detrimental in some situations. But "it adds an important insight" by identifying complexity as a key factor in determining which kind of thought process leads to the best decision. Schooler isn't ready, however, to dispense with conscious thought when it comes to complex decisions. "What I think may be really critical is to engage in [conscious] reflection but not make a decision right away," says Schooler.

Dijksterhuis agrees. When an important decision arises, he gathers the relevant facts and gives it his full attention at first. Then, he says, "I sit on things and rely on my gut."

Last word

Kinda got bored with the journals Nature and Science so looked for something more mainstream. Found NewScientist. Check out this really cool segment that they put up on the web. Link --> here. This week's question: In films, a hero often evades bullets by jumping into a river or lake. How far below the surface do they need to dive?

JGV 2006

The glycosylation site in the envelope protein of West Nile virus (Sarafend) plays an important role in replication and maturation processes

J. Li R. Bhuvanakantham J. Howe and M.-L. Ng

Flavivirology Laboratory, Department of Microbiology, 5 Science Drive 2, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117597

The complete genome of West Nile (Sarafend) virus [WN(S)V] was sequenced. Phylogenetic trees utilizing the complete genomic sequence, capsid gene, envelope gene and NS5 gene/3' untranslated region of WN(S)V classified WN(S)V as a lineage II virus. A full-length infectious clone of WN(S)V with a point mutation in the glycosylation site of the envelope protein (pWNS-S154A) was constructed. Both growth kinetics and the mode of maturation were affected by this mutation. The titre of the pWNS-S154A virus was lower than the wild-type virus. This defect was corrected by the expression of wild-type envelope protein in trans. The pWNS-S154A virus matured intracellularly instead of at the plasma membrane as shown for the parental WN(S)V.

J. Gen. Virol., Mar 2006; 87: 613 - 622.

The Singapore 2005 Yearbook

One paragraph in the new Singapore Yearbook!!! But too bad no pictures, or names. But something better than nothing. Part of one of the 5 most important achievements from the NUS community.

lots of chocolate for me to eat

Prof got back from her annual OZ trip and with her......CHOCOLATES!!!
Feast your eyes:

Random Pop

No Recipe for Superstardom

By Mary Beckman
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 February 2006

For all those parents wondering why their teens are so devoted to scantily clad pop stars, take hope: It's not really the music that they like. They just want to fit in, according to new research. The news isn't so encouraging for aspiring artists, though. While talent might distinguish good from bad, social pressure and pure dumb luck are also big influences on which bands gain the most fame, sociologists report in the 10 February issue of Science.

Music industry professionals would dearly love to figure out what makes some bands skyrocket off the charts while equally--or more--talented musicians wallow in relative obscurity. Obviously, they haven't been able to pin it down. (Neither have book publishers or movie producers, for that matter.) Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University, and colleagues wanted to know whether peer pressure contributes to which bands go platinum. Can science do a better job of picking pop idols than the cold calculations of capitalists?

Watts started by collecting 48 songs from unknown but real bands listed on a garage band Web site (including tunes such as Beerbong's "Father to Son") and creating an experimental music site. Visitors to the site were randomly assigned to a particular Web page. On one of these, they could listen to any of the rock songs and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5, then download them for free if they liked. Some songs were downloaded much more than others, and because all the visitor's judgments were independent, the researchers defined these as good songs.

Other visitors ended up on one of eight Web pages that looked the same except for numbers next to each song listing the number of times previous visitors to that page had downloaded the song. After tabulating the whims of 14,000 visitors, the researchers learned that there was some accounting for taste: Good songs always ranked high, and bad songs ranked low. But when visitors had access to information about what other people were downloading, they were much more likely to download songs with high download rates, even if they weren't the highest quality, and pushed the highest-ranked ever closer toward superstardom. This indicates that knowing what other people thought of the music influenced what people downloaded.

Moreover, success was random. Even though the eight Web pages started with the same 48 songs, different tunes hit the top 10 list in each. The researchers could not predict which songs would reach success in one Web page by examining the results of another. Stardom is indeed a crap shoot, Watts concludes. So if the independent rankings show that there actually is some accounting for taste, why does it lose out to popularity? "There's a social function to all of us liking the same thing," he speculates. "It's not the thing that's important, but having something to share."

Calling the experiments "pathbreaking," sociologist Michael Macy of Cornell University says the findings illustrate how a small advantage can snowball, making popularity hard to predict. Economist Robert Frank, also at Cornell, says the work shows "we're all susceptible to the herd mentality."

Related site

Columbia Music Lab

Ed: Quick click many many times on Flavilab make this site the most popular one and overtake Xiaxue and mrbrown. Muahahahahahah!!!!!

bazaar

A bazaar that coincides with the pagan worship of materialism clouded in a shroud called love. Anyway, it is the most innovative one I have seen to date that resides in this obscure corner of the uni.





Also, notice the empty stalls? Saturday wat?? Didnt take yesterday bcs too many people milling about and also note the new open look outside LT 25/24? Nice huh? They also extended the prep room for LT24 for the jokers from Science Club (okok,... I was a member there too before).

summer cleaning

Department getting rid of stuff from today onwards, gearing towards the big revamp thats due anytime now. So the first part is getting rid of the old unwanted stuff. Old rotor heads and an old chest freezer today, and who knows what tomorrow.

Know thy reviewer

Nature 439, 642 (9 February 2006) doi:10.1038/439642b
Journal lays bare remarks from peer reviewers
Emma Marris

Abstract
Cloak of anonymity shed by new publication.

Editors of a journal launched this week are out to revolutionize peer review. By publishing signed reviews alongside papers, they hope to make the process more transparent and improve the quality of the articles. But although journal editors seem intrigued by the experiment, most say they'll take some persuading to change the traditional, anonymous system.
At Biology Direct, an open-access journal launched by BioMed Central on 6 February, manuscript editors and peer reviewers will, in effect, be merged into one editorial board. Prospective authors will approach board members and if three agree to review a paper, it will be accepted. Reviewers' comments will be signed and published with the final paper, along with responses by the author. An author has the right not to make suggested changes, but the suggestions will be there for anyone to see. An author who disagrees with the comments can retract the paper.
Several journals, including the BMJ (British Medical Journal) and the Medical Journal of Australia, have experimented with naming peer reviewers, but Biology Direct is going further by routinely posting those reviews as part of the paper.
"I like the direct relationship the author can have with a reviewer, and the transparency of the end result," says David Lipman, director of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information and one of the journal's lead editors. He believes readers will get a more nuanced picture of science.
"We don't have that artificial, black-and-white situation where, because it got through peer review, it is all fine," Lipman says. "It will be those interactions with the peer reviewers that make it interesting."
Responses to the idea have been positive. "I love the fact that David Lipman is doing this," says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "I have always felt that the only ethically sound system of review was one where everyone knew everyone's identities."
Diane Sullenberger, executive editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says she'll be watching Biology Direct with interest, although her journal will not open its peer-review system any time soon. "If there was evidence in the literature that open peer review really had a significant advantage over blind review I think we'd see more of it," she says.
Lipman says that the new journal's policies are likely to evolve. "It is an experiment," he says. "But I think the overall approach can't help but succeed. If we are really successful, the better journals will take what they think works from it."

Question

Dear Flaviguy,
Flaviguy has a question; there are supposedly 5 other authors for this blog, but only the sixth ever placed an entry. What happened to the rest? Do they actually exist? Flaviguy is getting tired of blogging to himself.


Yours whatever-ly,

Flaviguy

tar pau

If you were observant enough or maybe free enough to come along to the hospital these days, you would see the whole of the service block's flat roof like head thingy wrapped up in plastic, like when you tar pau food from the canteen. So "what's up?" you may ask. This entry serves to educate my dear readers on what the heck NUH is trying to do. And no, to dispel the myth, the building didn't turn religious and wore a turban.

Once upon a time, a short short time ago, in a hospital near near away, there was a block, whose name is Service Block. Now this block was not very old, it was young; if you can imagine some of the historical buildings that went back as far as the 1800's are still standing today. So it was that one day, a person with a name, who will remains nameless here, was walking along the corridor when suddenly he saw! Gosh! a piece of concrete reinforced with steel structures and granite! Falling down!

Actually he deduced that the piece of the roof fell down, because he was the jaga going on his rounds early one morning and found a slab of the concrete jungle on the floor. Sorry, must dramatise abit because blog readers ONLY want to read sensational stuff.

So anyway, the hospital people got very excited. They sat together (on different chairs of course) and figured that the main building that was more than 10 years older than Service block would come tumbling down soon. So everybody got involved. There was the 'Save our Roofs' campaign, the 'Sky's falling' sect, the usual 'it's the government's fault' propaganda, and the 'puzzled student'. I (an intellectual being of the highest order of consciousness) of course, hate to discriminate but would have to admit this one time, that I for a season before last week belonged to the last group.




So the hospital people called in lots of engineers who came to inspect the building and to patronise the Kopitiam there. They found no fault with the main building but their report on the food has not been archived. So the 'sky's falling' sect got extremely dissapointed with this turn of events. The engineers had a second report, especially for Service Block, this time it was a poor prognosis. The building had innate structural defects. Call it genetic, call it environmental: soemthign had to be done.
So that explains the huge amounts of plastic bags around the roof. But they dare not put up any BIG signboards (actually they didnt put up any small ones as well: see first pic) for fear that the vast majority of the (regular class) human population will become paranoid of the hospital. That's why the 'puzzled students' group who suddenly found their path to the staff canteen suddenly blocked remains puzzled to this day.

I hope you have been enlightened.

Fake fakes and Real fakes

Placebo Showdown
By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News2 February 2006

Not all placebos are created equal, according to a new study.

In a rare trial pitting two fake treatments against each other, researchers have found that a sham acupuncture technique provided more pain relief than a dummy pill. The two nontreatments also caused different "side effects."
Placebo effects have been reported with pills, injections, and even surgery. Previous research hinted that some treatments might elicit stronger placebo effects than others, but the idea hadn't been rigorously tested, says Ted Kaptchuk, the researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston who led the current study.
Kaptchuk and colleagues recruited 270 people with repetitive strain injuries (such as the aching arm that results from pushing a computer mouse around a desktop day after day). Half the volunteers took a cornstarch pill once a day; the rest received a fake acupuncture treatment twice a week. Both groups were told they would receive either a placebo or real treatment during the trial and that they could receive real treatment afterwards free of charge. The needles used in the procedure looked identical to real acupuncture needles, but the point retracted into a hollow shaft instead of penetrating the skin. The vast majority of people can't feel the difference between the sham procedure and the real deal, Kaptchuk says.
People in both groups reported less pain after two weeks of treatment, Kaptchuk and colleagues reveal in the 1 February issue of the British Medical Journal. But in the following weeks, those who continued with the sham acupuncture experienced greater pain relief than those who stuck with the bogus pills. Kaptchuk suspects that the increased doctor-patient interaction in the acupuncture group--or possibly the procedure's mystique--may account for the difference. "It tells us that the ritual matters in health care," he says. The team also found that patients in the two groups reported side effects similar to those they'd been told to expect, including pain during and after treatment in the acupuncture group and drowsiness and dry mouth in the pill group. "We had people [taking the pills] calling up, too groggy to get out of bed," Kaptchuk says. Three patients in the pill group even withdrew from the study due to side effects.
The work provides an interesting illustration of how patients' expectations influence the outcome of treatments, says Leora Swartzman, a psychologist at Western Ontario University in London, Canada. But George Lewith, a clinical researcher at the University of Southampton, U.K. says the sham acupuncture technique may not be sufficiently fake. Certain Japanese acupuncture techniques also involve light taps to the skin without penetration by needles, Lewith says. Kaptchuk counters that such techniques haven't been shown to have any physiological effect, and he sticks to his conclusion: There's a real difference between bogus treatments.

moveee

Sorry, forgot to take any pics for Mic's BD, but got a movie of it. Download it while stocks last!

Jas' BD:

ht*p://s9.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=200UZSB0EYYAP1ZAJK06E0U69C

Mic's BD:

ht*p://s4.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0ZDN80R2426QB357BE93IEPBN5

Jas BD

Sulking as she reminisces on the steadily increasing amount of wax on her annual cake:


Any flaviviruses here?


A whitish looking black forest:



Refusing to pose for the cam:


Gottcha! Happy birthday!!!


Packing back some for mummy and daddy and her other half:

peer reviewed web

NaturePublished online: 1 February 2006; doi:10.1038/439516b
Experts plan to reclaim the web for pop scienceCan peer-reviewed portals strengthen Internet information?

Declan Butler

Is it feasible to peer-review the Internet? A coalition of science agencies and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is trying to do just that. They are launching what they claim will be an authoritative network of websites, where users can find trustworthy information on any subject. Top science organizations are signing up, but critics are sceptical about the project's rationale, and whether it can succeed.The Digital Universe project is billed as a "network of web portals", run by experts, on topics ranging from the Arctic and the oceans to the Solar System and the Universe. Users would navigate through the portals using a three-dimensional browser.You could "fly over an accurate virtual Earth to explore the contours of the Grand Canyon, swim with the fish of the Great Barrier Reef and travel through the human body", says an enthusiastic Robert Corell, chair of the steering committee for the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment and senior scientific adviser for the Digital Universe's Earth Portal.The project also includes an encyclopaedia that will use similar technology to the popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, is helping to create it. But that's where the resemblance ends. All content in the Digital Universe will come from vetted experts, and articles will be reviewed by editors before going live. There will also be links to approved websites.
The driving force behind the project is ManyOne, a company headed by Joseph Firmage, who made a fortune in the 1990s from an Internet consulting company. He resigned in 1999 after the fallout from his book claiming that he had encountered extraterrestrials.Firmage says he vehemently opposes the "anyone can edit" vision of Wikipedia. "Wikipedia is a very uninviting place for most intellectuals," he adds. "I myself would not want to be writing articles that could be edited by somebody who does not necessarily have any expertise." He hopes that peer-reviewed content will raise the standard of content on the web, which he describes as having "an intellectual deficiency of serious proportions"."The Digital Universe is an attempt to massively mobilize the scientific community," adds Cutler Cleveland, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University and editor of the Digital Universe's Earth Portal and other portals on Earth's environment. "The information you see here you will know is trustworthy in a fundamental way."Many are enthusiastic. The US National Council for Science and the Environment, the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford and the World Resources Institute have all signed up to help. The Digital Universe's Earth Portal, which is to be released next month, has contributors that include Gene Likens, the discoverer of acid rain, Thomas Kunz, a top bat expert, and Robert Costanza, founder of the field of ecological economics. Its international advisory board includes Rita Colwell, former director of the US National Science Foundation.
Critics interviewed by Nature were unwilling to speak on the record. But some believe that the project is over-complicated, and that much of its underlying technology — which still requires significant development — runs against the trend to distribute information in lightweight formats that can be accessed by cell phones or PDAs such as the BlackBerry. "If you have to rely on a high-bandwidth always-on network environment, on devices with a lot of storage, you are pretty much going in the wrong direction," says one critic, an expert in Internet information systems. He is also unimpressed by the Digital Universe's concept of peer-reviewing material. "There's more than enough content on the web, even substantive content," he says. "I'm not sure that generating new content is really a breakthrough."
There are also questions over the business model, in which revenue would largely come from selling high-speed Internet access, with half the profits fed back into the work. "It's an odd choice; that's a dying business," comments one observer familiar with the project, pointing out that in the future consumers will be unlikely to notice where their Internet access comes from. But he says he can't help being inspired by the idea. "They're trying to package science in a way that has some of the glitz and entertainment appeal of television, but that is also complete and correct," he says. "They're not in it for the money; actually, they're trying to save the world."
http://www.digitaluniverse.net

New year!

Happy Chinese new year everybody. And now for a word from our sponsors:

The Falvilab chronicles has been brought to you today by the numbers 1 through 8 and the alphabets capital letter A and B. (Background Sesame Street music cue to start)...






Ed:- wanted to have numbers 1 through 9 but ran out of yellow tip boxes. Wanted to have alphabets A to Z but ran out of white tips. Once again, for contributions to the lab endowment fund, please call 1800-poor-lab, that is, 1800-7667-522. Each call is a donation of $100.00. Thank you.