American Artist Rankings

Type	Name	RS	MG	Link Wiki	Link Y!	??
artist	Edward Hopper	5	1	=	948000
artist	Fredrick Church	9	2	=	820000
artist	Frank Stella	-	3	=	829000
artist	Sargent	4	4	=	597000
artist	Bierstadt	-	5	=	111000
artist	Pollack	-	6	=	383000
artist	Jasper Johns	6	7	=	567000
artist	Rauschenberg	14	8	=	247000
artist	Inness	-	9	=	54800
artist	Thomas Cole	8	10	=	2890000
artist	Eakins	6	11	=	134000
artist	Homer	10	12	=	1460000
artist	Wyeth	-	13	=	323000
artist	Rothko	7	14	=	364000
artist	O'Keefe	15	15	=	371000
artist	Copley	16	16	=	314000
artist	James Whistler	-	17	=	279000
artist	Cassatt	2	-	=	294000
artist	Hassam	3	-	=	101000
artist	T Robinson	11	-	=	1780000	?
artist	Milton Avery	12	-	=	265000
artist	C Durand	13	-	=	164000	?
architect	Frank Lloyd Wright	6	1	=	605000
architect	P Johnson		2	=	1170000
architect	Gehry		3	=	429000
sculptor	Calder	1	4	=	70500
architect	Venturi		5	=	89500
photographer	Walker Evans		6	=	293000
photographer	Dorothea Lange		7	=	167000
sculptor	Noguchi		8	=	47400
architect	Saarinen		9	=	110000
architect	Gordon Bunshaft		10	=	27800
photographer	Leibowitz	2	-	=	36200
photographer	Richard Avedon	3	-	=	701000
photographer	Stieglitz	4	-	=	97500
other	Louis Tiffany	5	-	=	3060000
photographer	Gordon Parks	7	-	=	438000

http://gerstein.info/gps/artist-rankings.xls

More on Cameras

Panasonic SV AS10 is a very Small Camera
http://reviews.cnet.com/Panasonic_SV_AS10/4505-6501_7-30556974.html
My old stuff : http://textstream.blogspot.com/2007/01/subcompact-camera-comparison.html

Letter responding to "One Number For All Your Phones" -- NY Times

Here's a letter I sent in which wasn't published:
I read with great interest the recent article about
GrandCentral.com. I just want to point out that this service closely
resembles SimulRing -- a simultaneous ring service that went out of
business several years ago. (See
http://www.thedigest.com/more/146/146-230.html ). My use of SimulRing
attempted to overcome the problem of changing your phone number that
was alluded to. I had one of my (multiple) phone numbers redirect to
the (hidden) SimulRing number and then had this call all the others. I
really liked SimulRing but was disappointed when I lost my phone
number (in addition to the service) when the company went bankrupt. It
might have been good to point out the bankruptcy risk to people
reading the article and contemplating enlisting.

---

Article Commented on:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01EFDC1E31F936A25750C0A9619C8B63
STATE OF THE ART; One Number For All Your Phones
By DAVID POGUE
Published: March 15, 2007
If you have only one telephone with one phone number, this column won't be of
any interest to you. Skip to another article, you eccentric you.
But first, count your blessings. Millions of people have more than one phone
number these days -- home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht --
and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple
answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell
when you're at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages
at work that say, ''On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I'll be on my cell; for the rest
of the weekend, call me at home.''....
[L2E]

Slow Down, Multitaskers; Don’t Read in Traffic - New York Times

This is definitely a factor in my productivity: 8 * 15' block < 90' straight!

---

http://del.icio.us/mbgmbg/Link_Multitasking

History, Digitized (and Abridged) -- NY Times

Particularly relevant to image collection -- digitize or disappear !

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History, Digitized (and Abridged)
Article Tools Sponsored By
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: March 11, 2007
THE National Steinbeck Center, at the top of Main Street in this farming community, exhibits an array of artifacts from John Steinbeck's life and works: family memorabilia, a passport from the 1960s and movie stills from ''The Grapes of Wrath.'' Downstairs, in a climate-controlled vault, is the original manuscript of ''The Pearl,'' his novella published in 1947. There is also an exuberant letter that Steinbeck wrote to a distant relative when he was a teenager, as well as rare footage of him on 16-millimeter film, introducing a 1961 movie, ''Flight.'' .....
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FA0A14FD38550C728DDDAA0894DF404482#
[clipcache]

Letter in response to "Say Everything" -- NY Magazine

Below is a letter I wrote in response to the article at bottom (which was never published). Sort of the ultimate in blogging. It's a bit of the extreme in the on-line world, but maybe a hint of the future. Viz:
I enjoyed the article about the seeming irreverence for privacy displayed by young people using the Internet. The article frequently alludes to what will happen in the future when we can mine and search for all the information young people are now posting. One can imagine historians of the future combing through the vast trove of past postings on the web, looking for subtle patterns and connections between individuals that weren't at all apparent in the present. However, it is one thing for historical analysis to turn up interesting facts someone left behind about himself; it is another for it to turn up facts about someone else. In particular, what will happen with young kids posting pictures on the web of their friends in all sorts of compromising situations? Beyond the extreme case alluded to in the article of salacious images posted without consent, what are we to make of the seemingly innocent practice of party pictures, snapped in instant but posted on the web for eternity. The kids posting this information are of course unaware of the potential long-term harm they are doing to others. New rules need to be developed governing what can and can't be posted about others without their consent.

---

http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/
Say Everything
By Emily Nussbaum
February 12, 2007 issue of New York Magazine
As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.
Yeah, I am naked on the Internet," says Kitty Ostapowicz, laughing. "But I've always said I wouldn't ever put up anything I wouldn't want my mother to see."
She hands me a Bud Lite. Kitty, 26, is a bartender at Kabin in the East Village, and she is frankly adorable, with bright-red hair, a button nose, and pretty features. She knows it, too: Kitty tells me that she used to participate in "ratings communities," like "nonuglies," where people would post photos to be judged by strangers. She has a MySpace page and a Livejournal. And she tells me that the Internet brought her to New York, when a friend she met in a chat room introduced her to his Website, which linked to his friends, one of whom was a photographer. Kitty posed for that photographer in Buffalo, where she grew up, then followed him to New York. "Pretty much just wanted a change," she says. "A drastic, drastic change."...
[L2E]

Letter in response to "Spam + Blogs = Trouble" -- Wired

Here's a letter I wrote in response to the article below (which was never published):
I read with great interest the recent Wired article relating to spam
blogs (dubbed splogs). The article obviously took a critical tone
towards this new nuisance. However, when the idea of manipulating
search engine rankings through creating patterns of links arose,
people initially thought it was rather humorous. It first entered the
public consciousness during the 2004 presidential election, when
manipulation of links referencing "miserable failure" brought up pages
related to George W Bush as a top-ranked item on a search (see, for
instance, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm). Now,
search-engine rankings are taken more seriously and, through the
mechanism of blogs, it's possible to automatically create deceiving
link patterns. It seems that on the internet, when there's an
important, interactive service, where it's possible for people to
rapidly and anonymously create content, there's going to be a problem
-- whether it's in the form of spam e-mail, spam blogs, or
manipulation of other web 2.0 services, such as wikis. Unfortunately,
this appears to be a general aspect of the web that needs to be dealt
with more robustly.

---

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/splogs.html
Spam + Blogs = Trouble
Splogs are the latest thing in online scams – and they could smother the Internet.
By Charles C. Mann
I am aware that spending a lot of time Googling yourself is kind of
narcissistic, OK? But there are situations, I would argue, when it is
efficiently – even forgivably – narcissistic. When I published a book last year,
I wanted to know what, if anything, people were saying about it. Ego-surfing was
the obvious way to do that. Which is how I stumbled across Some Title....
[L2E]

Climbing Ratings - Climbing With Mike

Climbing Ratings - Climbing With Mike: Climbing Ratings - from 5.0 to Spiderman
Understand how climbs are rated and learn more about the Yosemite Decimal Rating System.

For me:

5.6 is easy yellows, up easy flat wall.
5.7 is very overhung, but with big, black holds
5.8+ is green holds, in crevice, with very hard start and end
5.8++ is xmas tree

think big, ask big, want big, do small!

A Network-based Analysis of Polyanion-binding Proteins Utilizing Yeast Protein Arrays -- Molecular & Cellular Proteomics

Interesting work that does network analysis on top of phosphorylome data set. (Mentioned in recent talk by J Fang.)

---

http://www.mcponline.org/cgi/content/full/M600240-MCP200
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=16982674&dopt=Abstract
Molecular & Cellular Proteomics 5:2263-2278, 2006
doi:10.1074/mcp.M600240-MCP200 on September 18, 2006
A Network-based Analysis of Polyanion-binding Proteins Utilizing Yeast Protein Arrays
Nazila Salamat-Miller, Jianwen Fang... and C. Russell Middaugh,
The high affinity of certain cellular polyanions for many proteins (polyanion-binding proteins (PABPs)) has been demonstrated previously. It has been hypothesized that such polyanions may be involved in protein structure stabilization, stimulation of folding through chaperone-like activity, and intra- and extracellular protein transport as well as intracellular organization. The purpose of the proteomics studies reported here was to seek evidence for the idea that the nonspecific but high affinity interactions of PABPs with polyanions have a functional role in intracellular processes. Utilizing yeast protein arrays and five biotinylated cellular polyanion probes (actin, tubulin, heparin, heparan sulfate, and DNA), we identified proteins that interact with these probes and analyzed their structural and amino acid sequence requirements as well as their predicted functions in the yeast proteome. We also provide evidence for the existence of a network-like system for PABPs and their potential roles as critical hubs in intracellular behavior. This investigation takes a first step toward achieving a better understanding of the nature of polyanion-protein interactions within cells and introduces an alternative way of thinking about intracellular organization. 
[x29is]

Brain Man -- 60 minutes

Amazing ability (suggested by RB).....

---

60 minutes
Brain Man
http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/44/brain_man
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Meet Daniel Tammet, a 27 year-old math and memory wizard. He can do things with numbers that will truly amaze you. He is a savant. . . with a difference. Unlike most savants, he shows no obvious mental disability, and most importantly, he can describe his own thought process. Join correspondent Morley Safer as he explores the extraordinary life and mind of Daniel Tammet.

Of mice and men: cancer gene discovery using comparative oncogenomics -- Cancer Cell

Thought the comparative angle of these two studies (mouse to human) was interesting.

---

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16843259&dopt=Abstract
Cancer Cell. 2006 Jul;10(1):2-4.Click here to read  Links
Of mice and men: cancer gene discovery using comparative oncogenomics.
Tomlins SA,
Chinnaiyan AM.
With the proliferation of high-throughput technologies to profile the cancer genome, methods to distinguish causal from bystander genetic events are needed. Two recent reports by Zender et al. and Kim et al. in Cell use genetically defined mouse models to serve as biological filters to mine the human cancer genome. Integration of high-resolution copy number profiles of mouse tumor models and human tumors identified cIAP1 and Yap as oncogenes in human hepatocellular carcinoma, while NEDD9 was identified as a metastasis gene in human melanoma. Together, these reports demonstrate that a comparative oncogenomics approach can identify genes causally involved in oncogenesis and metastasis.

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought. [quote]

Thought it'd be nice to post this quote:
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
- Sir William Osler

Letter in response to "Unhappy Meals" -- NY Times

Here's the final text of letter I wrote in response to the article below (which was never published):
I was impressed by Michael Pollan's recent article on the American
diet and "nutritionism" ("Unhappy Meals"). I also enjoyed reading the
letters that commented on this article in last Sunday's magazine
(February 12th issue). That being said, I felt that, taken as a
whole, the letters offered a single take on Pollan's piece. Here I try
to offer a somewhat different perspective. Pollan's central thesis --
that Americans should move away from a science-based diet and toward
eating traditional, more natural foods -- is grounded in the
underlying idea that our bodies are carefully adapted to process
nutrients in the context of whole foods. These biochemical
adaptations stem from our development in Africa millions of years
ago. Note, however, that our bodies are adapted to thrive to the age
of reproduction -- not to old age -- on natural foods. The fact that
people are living so long now is as unnatural for the human species as
Pollan's notion of artificial foods, and a number of natural foods
beneficial to the young and growing are, in fact, completely unhealthy
from a longevity perspective. Moreover, many of the traditional foods
that Pollan extols are actually products of man's manipulation; that
is, many of staples of a traditional European diet ("Mom's food") are
not foods that our ancestors would have found grazing on the African
savanna, but rather are products of the later agricultural and
industrial revolutions. In particular, milk and dairy products
obviously relate to the domestication of animals. Many of the crops
that we routinely eat, such as corn, have effectively been genetically
engineered by thousands of years of breeding to be completely
different from what they first were. Thus, the original diet that
people were biochemically designed for is a far cry from what today's
vegetarian or adherent of the Mediterranean diet would eat. Thus, can
we really claim that it is imperative to move away from the human
manipulation of food?

---

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/magazine/11letters.t-1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?ex=1327640400&en=a18a7f35515014c7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?ex=157680000&amp;en=ec2685fd6c213846&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Unhappy Meals
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: January 28, 2007
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated
and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally
healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long
essay, and I confess that I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of
keeping things going for a few thousand more words....
[L2E ]

Letter in response to "Commercial Break" -- Wired

Below is a letter I wrote in response to the article at bottom (which was never published). Might be interesting in relation to magazine advertising. Viz:
I read with great interest the article about the innovative way that
Chevrolet decided to advertise its Tahoe SUV -- by trying to stimulate
lots of user generated content, some of it not so favorable. Taken to
the extreme, the logical extension of this strategy would be that
advertising should aim not so much to create a positive message as to
create buzz for its own sake. Thus, a successful advertising campaign
would simply result in an article such as the one I just read --
describing a new phenomenon, loosely associated with a product,
irrespective of its merits or demerits.

---

Issue 14.12 - December 2006
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/tahoe.html
Commercial Break
In a risky experiment, Chevrolet asked Web users to make their own video spots
for the Tahoe. A case study in customer generated advertising.
By Frank Rose
Commercial Break
The thinking went something like this: Chevrolet is all about being
revolutionary, right? (That's debatable, but since Chevy's tagline is "An
American Revolution!" this is where all discussion starts at its ad agency.) And
if Chevrolet is revolutionary, then its advertising ought to be, too. Ergo, the
Chevy message needed to escape the tightly controlled, painstakingly monitored,
woefully predictable confines of the 30-second TV spot and roam the online
jungle. But everybody's doing that now. So, Chevy marketers thought, let's take
this thing a notch further – let's have an online contest to see who can create
the best TV ad for the new Tahoe. The wikification of the 30-second spot – what
could be more revolutionary than that?
[L2E]

New Weapon in Web War Over Piracy -- NY Times

Doesn't mention that directly image collections (e.g. flickr or artstor) but this is potentially quite relevant to that.

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New Weapon in Web War Over Piracy
By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: February 19, 2007
Content-recognition software could address a major entertainment industry concern— songs and videos being posted on the Web without permission.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/technology/19video.html?ex=1329541200&en=ac662a919b4ff2cb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Freedom for Prisoners of Voice Mail -- NY Times

Looks interesting... wonder if it's worth a try

---

State of the Art

Freedom for Prisoners of Voice Mail

By DAVID POGUE

Published: February 15, 2007

If you're tired of spending time and cellphone minutes listening to the voice-mail lady, try new tools that convert voice messages to text and deliver them by e-mail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/technology/15pogue.html?ex=1329282000&amp;en=0a077798a213507c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
https://simulscribe.com/

ihop-net.org

Perhaps nice to interface with LinkHub, pubnet... .

---

http://www.ihop-net.org/UniPub/iHOP

www.levity.com/digaland/whitman

Liked the very interesting Whitman images, which make up one from many. These are similar in some respects to the cover of Nature for the sequencing of the genome (also, linked below).

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http://www.levity.com/digaland/whitman/index.html
http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu/~mbg/dom/fun3/nature-cover/
http://www.nature.com/nature/supplements/collections/humangenome

The Invisible Enemy -- Wired

Interesting pop science article that highlighted the new problem Acinetobacter baumannii has become from the war in Iraq.

---

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/enemy.html
The Invisible Enemy
Issue 15.02 - February 2007
The Pentagon created the perfect machine for saving the lives of soldiers wounded in Iraq. But then GIs started getting sick. The culprit: a drug-resistant supergerm infecting the military's evacuation chain.
By Steve Silberman
A homemade bomb exploded under a Humvee in Anbar province, Iraq, on August 21, 2004. The blast flipped the vehicle into the air, killing two US marines and wounding another - a soft-spoken 20-year-old named Jonathan Gadsden who was near the end of his second tour of duty. In previous wars, he would have died within hours. His skull and ribs were fractured, his neck was broken, his back was badly burned, and his stomach had been perforated by shrapnel and debris....
But he still had mysterious symptoms that he couldn't shake, like headaches, rashes, and intermittent fevers. His doctors gave him CT scans, laxatives, methadone, beta-blockers, Xanax, more surgery, and more antibiotics. An accurate evaluation of his case was difficult, however, because portions of his medical records never arrived from Bethesda. If they had, they would have shown a positive test for a kind of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii. In the taxonomy of bad bugs, acinetobacter is classified as an opportunistic pathogen. Healthy people can carry the bacteria on their skin with no ill effects - a process known as colonization. But in newborns, the elderly, burn victims, patients with depressed immune systems, and those on ventilators, acinetobacter infections can kill. The removal of Gadsden's spleen and the traumatic nature of his wounds made him a prime target....

www.eia.doe.gov

Might be nice to correlate with insulation and other durables over time.

---

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/contents.html

Gene Themes

EMINENT DOMINION -- New Yorker

Interesting re-evaluation, coupled with three exhibitions that might be nice to see.

---

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/skyline/
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/070205crsk_skyline_goldberger
http://www.learn.columbia.edu/moses/
EMINENT DOMINION
Rethinking the legacy of Robert Moses.
by PAUL GOLDBERGER
Issue of 2007-02-05
Posted 2007-01-29
For a generation, the standard view of Robert Moses has been that he transformed New York but didn't really make it better. This view was shaped by Robert Caro's epic biography "The Power Broker"—published in 1974 and in print ever since. (Parts of it initially ran in this magazine.) Caro portrays Moses as a brilliant political operative who perpetuated his power by means of grand public works....Moses is clearly due for a reëvaluation, and this week sees the opening of "Robert Moses and the Modern City," a huge exhibition that surveys his impact on New York. Organized by Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian at Columbia, the exhibition extends over three institutions. The broadest installation, at the Museum of the City of New York, is called "Remaking the Metropolis," and presents Moses's highway system and the big institutions, like Lincoln Center and the United Nations, that he helped build. "The Road to Recreation," at the Queens Museum of Art, documents Moses's new parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools; and "Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution," at Columbia's Wallach Art Gallery, shows his inventive mastery of the federal government's Title I slum-clearance programs, and the results, both good and bad.
[cached]

Data bleach

Total information awareness for worm genetics -- Science

Some relevant worm data integration papers. Integration methods are fairly simple from a computational standpoint.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16527956&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum
Science. 2006 Mar 10;311(5766):1381-2. 
Genetics. Total information awareness for worm genetics.Eddy SR.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5766/1481
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16527984&itool=pubmed_AbstractPlus
Science 10 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5766, pp. 1481 - 1484
DOI: 10.1126/science.1123287
Genome-Wide Prediction of C. elegans Genetic Interactions
Weiwei Zhong and Paul W. Sternberg*

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7052/abs/nature03876.html
Nature 436, 861-865 (11 August 2005) | doi:10.1038/nature03876
Predictive models of molecular machines involved in Caenorhabditis elegans early embryogenesis
Kristin C. Gunsalus et al.

What is biophysics ?

Structures, interactions and functions of biological molecules studied and
understood through the application of quantitative methods based on
physics and chemistry.

Is this the end of the scholarly journal? -- Christian Science Monitor

An interview based on article in the Scientist.

---

Is this the end of the scholarly journal?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0124/p14s02-stss.html
Publishing research to blogs and e-books is so easy, some are wondering if peer-reviewed journals are on their way to obsolescence.
By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Scientific advances sometimes come as lightning flashes of inspiration. But when scientists sit down to record and take credit for what they've found, they still use much the same method they have for decades – an article published in a scholarly journal.
But science's hidebound traditions are changing. The Internet has opened up new forms of publishing in which anyone in the world can find and read a scientific paper. And papers themselves are becoming more interactive, leading readers to the underlying data, videos, and discussions that augment their value. With blogs and e-books providing easy means of self-publishing, some observers are speculating that scholarly journals and their controversial system of peer reviews may not be needed at all.
"The traditional journal publishing medium we've grown used to really needs to evolve and change because that's not the way people are accessing information," says Mark Gerstein, a professor of biomedical informatics at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Dr. Gerstein cowrote an article, "The Death of the Scientific Paper," which appeared last year on The-Scientist.com, an online science magazine....
Already, an online database called arXiv (www.arXiv.org), hosted by Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., contains more than 400,000 scientific papers posted by their authors without peer review. (The papers often appear later in peer-reviewed journals). Its comprehensiveness makes arXiv (pronounced "archive") a valuable tool, Gerstein, the Yale researcher, says. If someone claims to make a new discovery, anyone can search this database and say, "No, you didn't. It's in the arXiv."
Nonetheless, Gerstein says he thinks scientific journals, and some kind of peer review, will be around for a long time. Publishing in prestigious journals is "deeply intertwined with [scientists'] reputations and their promotions," he says. "You still want to get the stamp of approval of a journal."

Don’t Call. Don’t Write. Let Me Be -- NY Times

Lots of advice to remove oneself from spam communication.

---

Business

Don't Call. Don't Write. Let Me Be.

By DAMON DARLIN

Published: January 20, 2007

How to get your name off lists, so sales people won't call, junk mail won't come, and spam won't clog the in-box.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/business/20money.html?ex=157680000&en=896f28ce9e43bcc0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
http://www.the-dma.org/consumers/offmailinglist.html
http://donotcall.gov/
http://www.optoutprescreen.com/
http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about-doubleclick/privacy/dart-adserving.asp
http://www.lexisnexis.com/terms/privacy/data/remove.asp

Some random interesting reads in 2005

8-Jan-05 times.com Two Studies Suggest a Protein Has a Big Role in Heart Disease

8-Jan-05 sciencenews.org What's Wrong with This Picture?

5-Jul-05 TechnologyReview.com The Fading Memory of the State

28-Jul-05 sciam.com Nanobodies by Wayt Gibbs

28-Jul-05 wired.com The Birth of Google

Thoughts on Yale Podcasts

Yale Press Podcast -- http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/podcast.asp

Nice episode #1. Liked description of The Yale Book of Quotations and Caesar Life of a Colossus (particularly the Addendum on the later). These were good because they gave to easy to understand overviews of well-worked out existing media (i.e. the books). However, it'd be nice if each podcast could have a brief summary and it's own episode page -- e.g. like http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005Publish/Jul/hour2_072905.html

Yale OPA podcast -- http://www.yale.edu/opa/podcast

The web page of this is a bit more confusing. Again it'd be nice, if each podcast could have a brief summary and it's own episode page, so you could refer to (and blog) an individual podcast. Some thoughts on specific ones: The podcast "American Foreign Policy: Multilateralism or Unilateralism. From the Yale Tomorrow campaign launch, recorded Sept. 30, 2006." was good but it'd be nice if it were connected with some specific textual material. Likewise for "Nutrition and Cancer Prevention: How diet can prevent cancer. Part of the Yale Cancer Center Healthline Series, recorded May 21, 2006." Again, however, I don't know where to go for more -- a paper, the professor's site, etc. The Tian Xu podcast is engaging. Liked the vision at end of a series of all possible mouse knockouts with high-res MRI to show which cells they affect. The Salzman talk gives a nice vision of developing a community of biomedical engineering. Both of these suffer from the lack of visuals referred to and some context given at the beginning. They are just bare recordings.

Subcompact Camera comparison

Some random stats and links related to finding the optimal subcompact camera.

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddpspxzw_26fdkpfw

Some flowery text on what Synthetic Biology is

Synthetic biology is a natural outgrowth of systems biology in the same way that molecular biotechnology was a natural outgrowth of molecular biology. That is, the molecular biology revolution (in the 1950s and 1960s) led to the discovery of the main molecular actors, thus paving the way for the fields of genetic and molecular engineering in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Goujon, 2001). At present, biology is undergoing another transition, first defining molecular and cellular systems in the context of systems biology and then using these to build new functionalities in the framework of synthetic biology (Arkin & Fletcher, 2006; Endy, 2006; Cassman, 2005; Vidal, 2001; Ge et al., 2003; Kitano, 2002a,b). One the main issues in early synthetic biology is developing sets of standard, interoperable, composable biological parts for manipulation (parts.mit.edu; Endy, 2005).

from wikipedia :

Systems biology is an academic field that seeks to integrate high-throughput biological studies to understand how biological systems function. By studying the relationships and interactions between various parts of a biological system (e.g. metabolic pathways, organelles, cells, physiological systems, organisms etc.) it is hoped that eventually an understandable model of the whole system can be developed.

from wikipedia :

Synthetic biology aims to create novel biological functions and tools by modifying or integrating well-characterized biological components (i.e. genes, promoters) into higher order genetic networks using mathematical modeling to direct the construction towards the desired end product.

Letter in response to "Open-Source Spying" -- NY Times

Here's a letter I wrote in response to the article below (which was never published):
I was very impressed by the recent article in the magazine section about how the
intelligence community could use collective intelligence in the form of wikis
and blogs to help combat potential threats. I think the idea of using collective
intelligence is a great one. However, I was very surprised that the article did
not mention the recent and public episode where it was suggested that Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) establish a Policy Analysis Market to
help predict terrorist threats. In the framework of magazine article, this
proposal appears to be quite prescient. Given the clear incentive of profit,
efficient markets are an even better idea for harnessing collective intelligence
than wikis and blogs. However, this proposal was strongly criticized in the
press and this lead to the resignation of DARPA department head John Poindexter.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html
Open-Source Spying
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 3, 2006
When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003,
he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long
been interested in international relations: he had studied Russian politics and
interned at the U.S. consulate in Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications
of politically persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek
fluent in Web-page engineering...
[L2E]

Letter in response to "A Cryptologist Takes a Crack at Deciphering DNA’s Deep Secrets" -- NY Times

Here's a letter I wrote in response to the article below (which was never published):
I read with great interest the recent "Scientist at Work" piece in Science Times focusing on Nick Patterson. I work in a similar area to Dr. Patterson and liked the way the piece developed the concept of a "Data Analyst". In particular, I thought it important that it showed that in seemingly disparate fields such as Military Intelligence, Finance, and Genomics, there was a common thread of having to grapple with and analyze large amounts of data. Increasingly, the modern world is being transformed by vast sea of social and commercial information being tracked on the internet and by the huge amounts of data being generated by high-throughput scientific experimentation. Because of this, we are increasingly being confronted with large data sets in many fields. The challenge is how to mine them as Dr. Patterson does. A related issue is how we should educate a new generation of ace analysts who can take a more straightforward path to their problem than Dr. Patterson has.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html
Scientist at Work | Nick Patterson
A Cryptologist Takes a Crack at Deciphering DNA's Deep Secrets
By INGFEI CHEN
Published: December 12, 2006
Thirty years ago, Nick Patterson worked in the secret halls of the Government
Communications Headquarters, the code-breaking British agency that unscrambles
intercepted messages and encrypts clandestine communications. He applied his
brain to "the hardest problems the British had," said Dr. Patterson, a
mathematician. Today, at 59, he is tackling perhaps the toughest code of all —
the human genome...Genomics is a third career for Dr. Patterson, who confesses
he used to find biology articles in Nature "largely impenetrable." After 20
years in cryptography, he was lured to Wall Street to help build mathematical
models for predicting the markets. His professional zigzags have a unifying
thread, however: "I'm a data guy," Dr. Patterson said. "What I know about is how
to analyze big, complicated data sets." In 2000, he pondered who had the most
interesting, most complex data sets and decided "it had to be the biology
people."...
[L2E]

Letter in response to "Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense" -- NY Times

Here's a letter I wrote with Andrew Smith in response to the article below (which was never published):
We read with great interest John Markoff's 11/12/2006 article "Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense." We agree with the excitement surrounding the emerging Web 3.0 but we feel that the article did not go enough into the controversy between today's highly unstructured version of the web, where documents are essentially disseminated in natural language free-text lightly marked up with HTML for display, and the more recent and contrasting semantic web being propelled by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which allows web information to be expressed and cross-referenced in fine-grained structured ways so applications can more readily and precisely extract key facts and information without having to worry about disambiguating meaning from natural language texts as is necessary in the current web. The article seemed mostly to suggest that the new Web 3.0 would emerge primarily from complex data mining of the current web to extract important entities (people, businesses, places, etc.) and relationships among them. Unfortunately, this problem is very difficult and is basically the artificial intelligence problem that many researchers have been working hard on for a long time with limited progress. This fact that it is extremely difficult to automatically extract fine-grained data, information, and relationships from today's web (and the best we can practically do is to support coarse-grained topical queries with search engines) is one of the primary motivations of the semantic web. It is noteworthy that the perfect, personalized "travel agent" scenario given in Markoff's article was basically the same as the primary running example from a 2001 Scientific American article by Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the web and semantic web) which introduced the semantic web to a wider audience.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12web.html
Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: November 12, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 — From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence....

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quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tools-collection

Thought this was a nice collection of del.icio.us tools, particularly: SlashLinks, sid.vicio.us, From Del.icio.us to WordPress, DiggLicious, and Diggdot.us .
However, couldn't find a tool that would interconvert between Digg and del.ico.us...

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http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tools-collection

Taking Control of Electric Bill, Hour by Hour -- NY Times

Availability of continuous pricing of power looks to be a useful feature in new dwellings...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/business/08power.html?ex=157680000&en=ce5fbf661c20579d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Taking Control of Electric Bill, Hour by Hour
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Published: January 8, 2007
A pilot project in Chicago allows residents to save money by shifting their use of power.

Midnight Run Timings

Lap	Wall clock	Delta	Time (min)	Mile	Minutes/mile
	12:00:00	0:02:46	0:19:47	0 to 2	0:09:54
1	12:02:46	0:17:01
2	12:19:47	0:10:15	0:10:15	2 to 3	0:10:15
3	12:30:02	0:08:12	0:09:13	3 to 4	0:09:13
	12:38:14	0:01:01
	12:39:15
Total		0:39:15

Graphs of the times with heart rates are here

The Energy-Drink Buzz Is Unmistakable. The Health Impact Is Unknown -- NY Times

280 mg caffeine/8oz > 2 * amt. in cup of coffee

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http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FA0C15F93F550C718DDDAB0994DE404482
THE CONSUMER; The Energy-Drink Buzz Is Unmistakable. The Health Impact Is Unknown.
By MICHAEL MASON
Published: December 12, 2006
Meet Jamey Kirby. If you're young enough, and hip enough, he'd like to sell you some Cocaine... Each 8.4-ounce can of Cocaine contains 280 milligrams of caffeine, more than twice the amount in a cup of coffee, and a throat-numbing blend of fiery spices.... This year, in a study published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology, a team of researchers analyzed the caffeine content of 10 popular energy drinks and found concentrations as high as 141 milligrams per 16-ounce can. While the Food and Drug Administration does not regulate the amount of caffeine in soft drinks, agency guidelines for colas suggest no more than 68 milligrams per 12-ounce serving....

So Many Advances in Medicine, So Many Yet to Come -- NY Times

Thought this was a great overview in simple terms of the advances in medicine in the last half century

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/health/26docs.html?ex=157680000&en=f5c21ae48e834d42&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
So Many Advances in Medicine, So Many Yet to Come
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
Published: December 26, 2006
Technology and treatments have come a long way, but the gains have led to new challenges.