Serratia infection is responsible for about 2% of nosocomial infections of the bloodstream, lower respiratory tract, urinary tract, surgical wounds, and skin and soft tissues in adult patients.
Until the 1950s, S. marcescens was erroneously believed to be a nonpathogenic “saprophyte”, and its reddish coloration was used in school experiments to track infections. It was also used in biological warfare testing by the U.S. military as a substitute for weaponized tularemia bacteria. On September 26 and 27, 1950, the U.S. Navy conducted a secret experiment named “Operation Sea-Spray” in which S. marcescens was released by bursting balloons of it over the densely populated San Francisco Bay Area in California. Although the Navy apparently believed the bacteria were harmless, beginning on September 29, 11 patients at a local hospital developed very rare, serious urinary tract infections, and one of these individuals, Edward J. Nevin, died. Cases of pneumonia in San Francisco also increased after S. marcescens was released.
Concerning Nature’s “open access”
Earlier this week the Intartubes were boiling with the news that Nature Magazine would open its archives back to 1869. Which would, indeed, be marvelous and unexpected.
But it’s a little more complicated than that… it seems Nature’s publisher, Macmillan, is going to let paid Nature subscribers use (yet another) foredoomed-to-failure “read only sharable format”.
The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.
That sounds pretty great for everybody, right? Win-win!
ReadCube, a software platform similar to Apple’s iTunes, will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles’ PDFs. If the initiative becomes popular, it may also boost the prospects of the ReadCube platform, in which Macmillan has a majority investment.
Starting to sound a lot dodgier now… we may have a reality disconnect going on…
Although the screen-view PDF cannot be printed, it can be annotated — which the publisher says will provide a way for scientists to collaborate by sharing their comments on manuscripts.
Yep, reality check sorely needed. Hey, look, smartphones have cameras!
ReadCube -> monitor screen -> camera phone -> email -> PC -> printer.
There are no formats that can be viewed but not printed. If you think such a thing exists, everything you’ve built is suspect, because you’re apparently not entirely aware of what’s going on around you. The odds are good that Macmillan’s “read only format” can be trivially defeated, and that script kiddy hacks will be available in short order.
Any questions?
Accurately named network distortion tool
“Comcast is a tool designed to simulate common network problems like latency, bandwidth restrictions, and dropped/reordered/corrupted packets.”
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Nukes and America’s Energy Future
Even if ground-based nuclear power was economically viable in the USA (which it it isn’t, despite massive subsidies) I don’t think our socio-economic system is set up to handle nuclear power. It seems unlikely to me that an adequate level of quality technical administration can be maintained in the post-Reagan business environment; our corporations will inevitably cut costs and staffing until an accident occurs. And that kind of feedback loop does not match up well with pollutants that have lethal doses measured in parts per million and half-life measured in thousands of years.
Fermentation products, particularly methane (aka “Natural Gas”) and alcohols from cellulose (currently not in large-scale production, but China’s already building out the infrastructure) are a far better choice than nuclear. We’ve already got the infrastructure and distribution media for it, and it’s infinitely sustainable and carbon-neutral. Scientifically, it’s a no-brainer; it even leads theoretically to future global temperature management schemes based on vegetative sequestration and release of carbon.
Nuclear power generation works great in space, and we should use it there. On earth we already have clean methane burning appliances available in the Home Depot and Sears, and we already have containment technology that works and restricts accidents to manageable proportions. The biggest real obstacle is that sustainable fuels displace profits from the currently dominant political and economic powers, namely the Texas Oil Barons and their dirty energy lobby. If you build a giant algae vat in Death Valley that generates clean methane or alcohol from waste agricultural products incredibly cheaply, you will directly take income from Esso and Texaco. If you build a nuke plant, there’s no problem, because the dirty energy lobby also owns the means of nuclear power plant construction and operation, and I’m sure they’d much prefer walled nuke plants patrolled by Erik Prince’s armed goons to huge empty plains spotted with oil derricks.
Antikythera mechanism on your wrist
Despite my well known obsession with the Antikythera device, I somehow didn’t notice Loz Blain’s excellent 2011 sildenafil samples Successful samples of generic viagra treatment: You always want a treatment that had been withered away for a long time. Utilizing the internet for getting generic levitra online drugs can save you lots of money. Secondly lack of knowledge can be one reason why this drug is very famous in so many people is due to the veins carrying less blood to cialis online mastercard those parts. Gizmag column, which pretends to be solely about Hublot’s recreation of the mechanism as a somewhat clunky wristwatch.
The White Tower
The header today is a panoramic view of the Tower of London, taken by #1 son. This is only part of that panorama – the whole thing can’t really be made to fit WordPress’s header aspect.
When I was younger I had a mental image of the Tower as something resembling a chess rook, with the heads of traitors on spikes over the portcullis and shivering naked miscreants suspended in cages from the walls.
Even though I’ve known for decades that my vision of William the Conqueror’s citadel was totally wrong (well, except the heads and cages part) I was unprepared for the sheer size and magnificence of this fortress. I wish we’d had more time to explore, and I hope we can go back some day.
Mini-ITX with amped 7.1 audio outs
For my kids
Remember this the next time I
almost burn down the property, OK?Office not so 365
Microsoft’s Azure Cloud service failed at almost exactly midnight last night, taking down hundreds of websites who may have thought that hardware redundancy could magically protect them from sysadmin oopses, as well as users of Xbox live and Microsoft’s flagship service Office 365.
Viva Zorggroep, a Dutch healthcare organisation with 4,000 employees, said it had also been affected as a consequence of adopting Microsoft’s online apps.
“At this time, our supporting departments such as finance, HR, education, IT et cetera are working with Office 365,” said Dave Thijssen, an IT manager at the company.
“This morning these servers were unresponsive, which means users were not able to log in to Office 365.
“As a result they had no access to email, calendars, or – most importantly – their documents and Office Online applications.“We also had trouble reporting the outage to our users as most of digital communication – email, Lync, intranet/Sharepoint – was out.
The outage persisted for over five hours for some customers and apparently there are still latency issues at this time. This is of course a violation of the Service Level Agreement… so you can keep a nickel or two of your monthly rent, I bet.
Inside the Instruments
German studio photographers Mierswa & Kluska shot these beautifully lit images from the inside of musical instruments for Bjoern Ewers and Mona Sibai as part of an advertising campaign for the chamber ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2009.
SatNOGS wins Hackaday prize
Coverage here. Very impressive, but personally I was even more impressed by the DIY spectrometer.
XKCD Philae coverage as a flipbook
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Harpoon it, Philae!
Edit 2014-11-14: From this blog post, a somewhat speculative plot of the bouncy landing, showing how close Philae might have come to tumbling off Churyumov-Gerasimenko and into space.
It’s believed that Philae bounced twice – the first bounce took about two hours, and the second one 7 minutes. As expected, the comet’s lack of mass and consequent lack of gravity has been a big challenge. At this point, it’s believed that the lander may be lying on its side, making a harpooning attempt out of the question. The drilling maneuver currently being carried out may push the lander upright, or out of the little sunlight it’s been getting, or even entirely off the comet, but there’s no way to tell just yet….
Microsoft climbs aboard the WordPress bandwagon
If you were thinking to yourself “what my PHP-based content presentation system really needs is an expensive backend Microsoft has got your number.
The opposite of productivity
“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not
It looks more like sexism if anything
There’s people claiming that the high tech industry is essentially racist, because it’s got a lot of white people in it, especially in high positions. The way the census works makes it hard to compare, but this is what I fudged together for the entire USA’s racial and gender demographics from the 2010 census figures. It’s probably pretty close to correct.
• The USA: 64% white, 16% Hispanic, 12% black, 5% Asian, 3% two or more races, <1% other, slightly less than 51% female, slightly more than 49% male. Here's the numbers delivered by the high tech companies (as quoted in this interesting essay):
• Apple: 55% white, 15% Asian, 11% Hispanic, 7% black, 2% two or more, 1% other, 9% undeclared, 30% female, 70% male.
• Facebook: 57% white, 34% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 3% two or more races, 2% black, <1% other, 31% female, 69% male.
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• Google: 61% white, 30% Asian, 4% two or more races, 3% Hispanic, 2% black, <1% other, 30% female, 70% male.
• Twitter: 59% white, 29% Asian, 3% Hispanic or Latino, 3% two or more races, 2% black, 2% other, 1% American Indian or Alaskan native, 1% native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 30% female, 70% male.
• Yahoo: 50% white, 39% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 2% black, 2% two or more races, 2% other/not disclosed, 37% female, 62% male, 1% other/not disclosed.
Obviously the raw numbers don't tell a complete story, but they are interesting. Oh, and for those who haven't thought about it, the subcontinent of India is in Asia. AND for the record I have met very few people in my life who could be accurately described as "white" or "black" - most people I know are various shades of pink or brown, sometimes with a yellowish or bluish undertone in certain lighting, and quite often with contrasting spots.
Android 5.0 is out
It’s got better support for filesystems and for SD cards, despite Google’s claim that file managers and removable storage are simply too confusing and difficult for their user base. Google’s been flooded with complaints about their rejection of SD cards (and Android tablets like the nVidia Shield that support SD cards are massively outselling Google’s offerings) so perhaps calling their customers clueless wasn’t such a great business move. I haven’t heard anything about the app permissions debacle, so I’m assuming that’s still horribly broken.
Mechadon!
Mechadon was built as a contestant for the (now defunct) robot wars TV show. The show had devolved into mostly a bunch of ramps trying to flip each other upside down, and Mechadon is sort of the antithesis of that. He really doesn’t even have any up or down, and his back’s not any different from his front.
Unfortunately Mechadon is very heavy, too heavy for the main fighting categories of the show, despite his lack of armor over the actuators. The end of this video shows a maneuver the creators called the “death blossom” – note the feet punching divots in the concrete floor on touchdown!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX5kHKRF2dI
More evidence for group selection!
OK, well maybe
not then.There is a Dad in this house.
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You’re welcome. Now get out of my yard!