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Thursday, April 27, 2006 |
Croquet is out.
We already spoke about Croquet in this blog ; but until a few days ago, only a prerelease, "alpha" version, named Jasmine was available on the net. Last week, the first beta version of croquet (full of bugs, but existing) can be downloaded at www.opencroquet.org. Among the creators of Croquet, one may find Alan Kay, one of the greatest pioneers of computer science, former member of the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research center) where the modern computer was invented in the 70’s.
What is croquet ? it might be the future of computing. As its creators say: "…a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using Croquet, software developers can create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations."
documentation they add:
"There are no boundaries in the system. We are creating an environment where anything can be created; everything can be modified, all in the 3D world. There is no separate development environment, no user environment. It is all the same thing. We can even change and author the worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating."
"The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way tocontrol the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would declare himself as King. Thiswas great for the King. And not too bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end – technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides ofthe castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology enables this." [unmediated]
6:19:23 PM 
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Up for trade: afternoon with Alice Cooper.
The guy who is attempting to barter his way from a single red paperclip to a house through a series of trades has a new item up for barter: an afternoon with Alice Cooper:
Kyle MacDonald just traded the rented house he had up for trade in Phoenix for an afternoon with Alice Cooper. A girl who works for the 80s heavy metal hero at his restaurant asked Alice to help her get one free year of rent, and he agreed to spend an afternoon with one lucky fan. Kyle MacDonald is trading his way up to owning a house. Link (Thanks, Tyler!)
[Boing Boing]
5:54:45 AM
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Americans on the internet.
This Pew Internet & American Life Project report says,"surveys fielded in 2006 show that internet penetration among adults in the U.S. has hit an all-time high.While the percentage of Americans who say they use the internet has continued to fluctuate slightly,our latest survey,fielded February 15- April 6, 2006 shows that fully 73% of respondents (about 147 million adults) are internet users,up from 66% (about 133 million adults) in our January 2005 survey.And the share of Americans who have broadband connections at home has now reached 42% (about 84 million),up from 29% (about 59 million) in January 2005".
Internet Penetration and Impact [Smart Mobs]
5:41:05 AM
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Speaker series will bring big names to campus. Students at Webster often complain about the quality of speakers and events on campus. But following an April 20 announcement by university President Richard Meyers and former Missouri Governor Bob Holden, they might be in for a surprise. [The Journal]
5:40:23 AM
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HIV and human variation.
There is a preprint in the website of The American Journal of Human Genetics titled "Genetic variation in the CCL18 - CCL3 - CCL4 chemokine gene cluster influences HIV-1 transmission and AIDS disease progression." The title is a mouthful, but the short of it is what we've known for a long time, that human genetic variatian responds differently to HIV infection (or the risk of infection). This is surely going to be important, not because the science is a priori killer, but because AIDS is a big public policy issue. Back in the 1990s some people were talking about HIV resulting in the extinction of the human race (OK, I'm mostly talking about my teachers), but real knowledge of evolution would have implied that this is ridiculous. Plagues and pandemics come and go, but the species always bounces back, and we are a numerous large mammal so operational immunity is almost certainly going to be found amongst a small minority (as it has been).
In any case, since the paper is a preprint there isn't an abstract. Rather, the major points seem to be this: some SNPs are correlated with faster disease progression, and Europeans are also characterized by lower polymorphsim and greater linkage disequilibrium than African Americans on the region of the genome of interest. The linkage disequilibrium manifests in "haplotype blocks" that may be the product of recent powerful selection on loci around which recombination has not had time to break apart the associations generated by the hitch-hiking effect. [Gene Expression]
5:28:30 AM
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