Strategic Thinking and Execution

Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, Part II

2011-10-22T20:25:00.000-07:00

In my last Blog post I coined a term, "Servers in the Basement Syndrome", which I suffered from in the years around Y2K.

In this post I wanted to discuss a little more the cure for SITBS and how that cure is analogous to what I believe is required to service the needs of the massive wave of hobbyists, enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs that is sure to follow the advent of arduino technology in domestic mass market outlets like Radio Shack and Bets Buy.

To recap, SITBS is identifiable by that yucky feeling you get when you realize you are spending all of your free time on Linus system administration, when you just wanted a server that you could use for code development. System administration can be a monster time suck and when you are a lone entrepreneur or enthusiast it can become, will become, overwhelming at some point.

My experience with SITBS was that the ultimate cure came with the advent of Amazon AWS EC2 as a server platform and Rightscale as a deployment management toolset. These tools first took the server out of the basement, and then automated to the point of virtual elimination all of the configuration setup and maintenance work that would enslave the unwary.

But this was the end point of a long exploration of SITBS by large numbers of folks who stumbled their way toward a solution. If you lived through that time you know that there are a number of stages that we all went through and it is useful to enumerate them here, for reasons that may become obvious in a minute. These stages are loosely ordered, in that they all occurred, but this was a decade ago and my memory of the details of those times is sometimes thankfully hazy.

Sort of first, we went through a phase of alternate distributions. This is where there was a cambrian explosion of different Linux/Unix versions, each of which had its own focus, ease of use, usability, etc. There was a proliferation of support for different package systems, graphical user interfaces, and other 'important' aspects of each system.

Somewhere in there was the notion that you could monetize a particular distribution and so there was experimentation with business models around distributions. Pay per download, per disc, free, free as in beer, etc...

Virtualization brought the notion that you could download a pre-packaged instance of something, load it up, and away you go. so then the distribution focus above became a virtual machine focus where some of the config challenge went lateral as you were now setting up VM support to install a pre-pack.

In the VM world you went from paid distributions to paid, free, free as in beer, etc, virtual machines.

Then EC2 came along. EC2 came with preconfigured machine templates on top of which you could install things, so you no longer had to install red hat to install a lamp stack. Machine Templates also started showing up, which were EC2 versions of prepackaged virtual machines which were pre-installed virtualized distributions. So you had paid, free, free as in beer, etc, machine instances.

EC2 also shifted you to opex from capex for usage of a machine somewhere else, in return for which you lost part of your SITBS as the server was no longer in the basement. But it was still the case that you had to work to configure the machine template once installed, so maybe it was "Servers in the Cloud Syndrome", a related condition...

Rightscale then came with the notion that configuration is an automation task, so it implemented chef scripting and provided an easy way of scripting every part of the process of cloud server configuration. It also provides off the shelf configuration scripts for the most often used stacks. This means that to get a lamp stack on an rhel server in Amazon you can go to right scale, click a few buttons, enter some text where the scripts are going to need inputs like which directory you want your website installed, and it will then go build it for you, from scratch, in about a minute. If you want 2, you then push one button, and another will appear.

Righscale adds a cent or 2 per hour to Opex, but offsets that by auto installing management tools that save you far more time and effort, so you don't mind.

Its probably important to contemplate at this point the fact that in the early, distributions, phase of this discussion, there were discussions about whether people could copyright LAMP stack implementations and then use the copyrights to monetize the use of the stack. Today, we have web available automated mass customization tools that make it clear that the stack is a commodity and that what you do on top of it is what is important.

Ok, so why all the words on this? So what?

If you read my last blog post you know that I think we are roughly in the distributions phase with open hardware, and that I think the path of online server virtualization provides some close, structurally, about where things may and hopefully will go.

The tools gap I see is that the enthusiast, when assembling parts from Sparkfun and Adfafruit, will ultimately wish, for reasons that are human and inexplicable, to then convert that assembly into a custom circuit board. Doing so today means engaging in the use of a tool called Eagle Cad, which is a Circuit and circuit board design and layout tool, or one of several open source alternatives which essentially replicate it in features and functionality.

I purchased a copy of Eagle CAD and at first blush it is clear that this tool has a deep learning curve, requires practice and specific knowledge to use well, and represents in User Experience roughly the same joy as hunting and pecking around a 1970's 200 button motorola remote control. By modern web standards, everything about it is, gently, unfriendly.

Further, the tool is useless without a deep understanding of electronic parts, which are available in a bewildering assortment of variations, from online sales sources like digikey and mouser. It can, by all accounts, take a professional more than a day to identify and implement the design use of a simple resistor from one of these sites.

In other words, you fall quickly down a rabbit hole where there are specific traditional methods of doing things that are seemingly untouched by modern notions of usability and convenience.

Its not like these issues are unrecognized. At the recent Open Hardware Summit in NYC, there was a fair amount of discussion about the need for open source design tools, more transparent parts libraries, and better systems for putting these together. The primary driver of these discussions appeared to be that open sourced designs were not easily implementable using the current methods as the parts lists, designs, and other metadata were not easily and consistently available, meaning that open really usually means 'get ready for days of slogging trying to figure out which capacitor they used' , a situation that begins, after the first frustrating foray, to seem less than acceptable if the whole point of the open source exercise is to enable rapid innovation by eliminating the whole 'reinventing of the wheel' portion of the activity.

So, analogously, the objective of mass customizable, easily produced, replicatable, design and BOM documents for circuit board designs today seems a little like the goal of an easily installable, up to date, working LAMP stack on any server you wanted did in 2001. The resistors and other parts seem a little like the linux drivers for that new graphics card you just bought, hard to find and full of potential for conflicts and complications. The Radio Shack and Best Buy crowd feel potentially just like the waves, hordes, of kids who knew nothing about technology and a lot about HTML that were crowding into the space.

So assuming that we want a push button system that will accommodate people who know very little about circuits and a lot about Arduino code, what would that solution look like?

Product managers know that customers do not want the tool, they want the capability. Not a hammer, but a way to pound nails. Not a USB connector tied to a MAX155x, but a way to charge a LiPo battery. So the first step is to realize that, although you care about them greatly, requiring other, customer, people to know the details may not promote a popular solution.

Another thing that probably becomes important is the notion that you want to eliminate from your solution tasks that simply have to be performed EVERY SINGLE TIME, BY EVERY SINGLE PERSON, while creating absolutely no new incremental value or human knowledge. So for instance, if it becomes apparent you need to add a 300Ohm resistor between your temperature sensor and your Arduino PWM input EVERY TIME you go to design and build one, you might just want to go ahead and find a way to throw that step in automatically.

The final, and probably most controversial, part of finding a solution is to simply set out to eliminate the need for any human artfulness on the part of the end user for it to work. It is the need for human artfulness that is at the root of this discussion. There was a time when making a LAMP stack on a machine actually work required something akin to magic. Similiarly, when using Eagle or any of the other circuit CAD tools, there is a point where things need to be done that, presumably, no machine can do as well as a human. It is precisely those things that need to be eliminated from the equation, or at least managed in a way that makes them invisible and incidental to the activity at hand.

The Rightscale/AWS solution stack hides the complexity involved in a bunch of ways. First, it standardizes machines. No wonky graphics cards means no obscure graphics drivers. Second, it implements set of pre-configured building block scripts that have well known inputs and outcomes. Third, it provides the means of drilling down into the guts of the implementation without in any way requiring that the end user do so. So there is a lot of human artfulness implemented in the solution, and you can still be perfectly ignorant while using it.

Applying this to the Board design problem, it seems:

building blocks of circuits, not parts, are appropriate, where the underlying parts layer has been absolutely standardized. In this paradigm the end user would choose to sense light, not a light sensor. The underlying tie in to the arduino would be assumed and automatically implemented.
Variation is minimized. If you think about a 'design space' encompassing the major circuit assemblies people might want, then what you get is assorted sensor capabilities (light, magnetism, 3 axis position, GPS position, etc, maybe 10- 12 possibilities in all), switches, LEDs, wireless capability, power (battery, solar, wall, USB), you get the point. maybe 20 - 30 different high popularity items that need to be combined with an arduino, with the added complexity that you may want 2 or 3 of some item and none of many others. Assuming that the parts used were standardized, as though all of the parts came from a single well known and described list of parts, then ~30! variations, plus or minus ~5! would seem to be something like the order of magnitude of the configuration space you are describing. (Google says that (30 !) - (5 !) = 2.6525286 × 10³² , which is still too large a configuration space for every possibility to be hand created: there are only something like 7 x 10^9 people on the entire planet.)
Reuse should be encouraged: once a design is done, showing some combination of parts, assembled, there is no real reason why that design should be done again unless there are specific reasons why the physical shape or placement of parts should vary. Pricing, however minimal, is a good way to test these requirements e.g. ~$1 for a previously done design, ~$10 for a completely new variation.

The core requirement to fulfil this is three fold:

a circuit library of standardized circuits, defined along with the parts required to fulfil them. This would fulfil the requirement for variation reduction.
a user interface that can combine the standardized circuits into a single circuit design, intelligently adding the necessary interface components (resistors, power step converters) so the whole thing will work. If done properly, this should eliminate the requirement for specific knowledge to benefit from the solution.
a layout component that can take the circuit and lay it out onto a PCB, iterating until it comes up with some optimized solution. The layout component is where the most human artistry is required today. It is not clear that machines can be programmed to perform some of the tricks that humans perform in this domain, such as using trace resistance in place of discrete components. Some of the artistry required seems to be compensation for a lack of application of sufficient computing power. For example, in the Eagle Cad solution, the 'router' component can automatically attempt layout, but seems to rely on humans to rotate parts to help optimize the solution. In a modern environment where large clusters of on demand compute horsepower are cheaply available, it seems such variation testing, akin to monte carlo simulation, should be possible without human intervention. In other words, with sufficient brute force computing, it may be possible to then mass customize the solution in real time.
The ability to add new circuits and take away old or unused ones seems required, as does the requirement to reset designs to 'not yet completed' status where the underlying parts have become unavailable and a new design is therefore required.

in looking at these requirements, it is clear that the layout component is the crown jewel. It likely exists in a crowded intellectual property domain, and requires specific and non-trivial knowledge to implement. However, once achieved, a machine solution could conceivably be tasked with traversing the entire configuration space, producing optimized designs for each variation, and then making these widely available for consumption at no additional real cost. This might be a boon to the community as a whole, especially if any specific design were easily modified to provide for specific physical packaging requirements.

so the objective, I think, would be to mobilize the open source hardware community to develop and maintain a web accessible circuit aggregation user interface with an automated layout capability that can take advantage of modern cloud computing methods to brute force the optimization of layout designs that could then be modified and reused by the community at nominal ongoing cost. This would be the functional equivalent of the Rightscale /AWS solution for providing LAMP stack capability that web developers enjoy today.

Beyond the Yellow Brick Road

2011-10-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

In Y2k, when the market crashed, I had an annoying problem. My friends and I all wanted to become Internet Billionaires. That meant web development, and that meant, for many of us, servers in the basement syndrome.

Servers in the basement syndrome was characterized by foul moods, caused by Linux system administration overload, brought on by the joys of downloading and installing, for the 15th time, apache, php, perl, and all the other kit you needed, and made critical by the constant queries of spouses as to exactly why that box needed to reside in that corner of the room, and wasn't it noisy? Did it need to be so noisy?

Servers in the basement syndrome sucked, but there was not much you could do about it. You needed servers in the basement: they were part of the yellow brick road.

So we all know the wizard of oz, and we all know the yellow brick road: it is the path you and everyone else must traverse if you want to go home, or at least, to the place you would like to call home.

In the first decade of the century a sort of technological yellow brick road emerged that we all seemed to need to go down. It was based on an understanding of the tools that were needed to build a garden variety web site. These came to be known acronymically as the LAMP stack, where the letters stood for Linux (OS), Apache (Web Server), MySQL (Database), and PHP/Perl and lately Python (programming language). What was needed was to assemble a platform that would provide these things, and then develop some browser-based experience on top of it. Once that was done all you had to do was convince the guys at TechCrunch to ignore the man behind the curtain long enough to really grok your demo and Bang!. Instant Billion$.

So suffice to say, in the beginning, this was a PITA to actually do as a hobbyist web developer. Later, it became much easier. Amazon launched EC2, its virtual server farm, LAMP templates for servers appeared, and suddenly you could turn one on remotely, INSTANTLY, for 10 cents an hour.

My wife has never been happier with me than the day I told her about that. The exact words that made her smile? "We'll never need a server in the basement again".

I feel that we are in the same place again, equivalent in PITA factor to server in the basement syndrome circa Y2K, with the open source hardware movement. In saying that, what I am really saying is that I see us moving beyond the web yellow brick road to a new path that traverses some fundamentally different terrain while similarly encompassing a journey that all enthusiasts must endure.

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I am a classic newbie maker. I bought a copy of make magazine so I could read about autopilots for RC aircraft. I got an Arduino and learned they are like cockroaches (there is never just one). When the dreaded letter came home from school, I built a blinkenlight extravaganza of a robot for my little girl for school, the Arduino Butterfly.

I was hooked.

At some point, after hundreds of dollars out the door to Sparkfun and Adafruit, I discovered a combination of parts and software that seemed strangely useful, possibly even commercially fruitful, and then I wondered what to do next.

Arduinos are European, and there is more than a whiff of performance art about them. They are touted as being very easy to use. There is even a user manual on Amazon that a 5 year old could understand (I'm testing this) that tells you how to use them.

The objective becomes, at some point, to take some arduino-centred wired-up assembly of boards and components and turn them into single, customized, populated, circuit board that can be distributed to the masses. Who knows why that becomes the objective. Sort of like the moment you decide you need to buy the Doors Greatest Hits a week into college, it just does.

The question becomes, then,"how do I do that?" and so I set out to answer that question.

After extensive eavesdropping on mailing lists, harassment of people at a highly informative trade show, and a lot of deep contemplation in the shower (not pictured due to the sheer ugliness of the content involved), I formed a picture of the new trail that must be followed.

The picture I perceived was striking in its lack of resemblance to the ease of use of the Arduino, yet striking also in its implied similarity to the saturday night penance that was servers in the basement in the age before Amazon.

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At first it all seems great. There are friendly people all over the Internet who want to help you succeed in your quest. They can make your boards. They can place your parts. They can ship it all to you. For a small fee, of course, but they take credit cards, and the prices are so reasonable.

It seems that the whole world does this sort of thing. As a newbie I was shocked at how easy this alls seemed to be. Just design it up, shoot it over, a little KaChing at the cash register, life is good, right?

There is, however, just one small issue. It seems that the tools required to do that design, so you can then 'shoot it over', actually require you to know a bunch of complex things about a bunch of complex things.

The file format required is called 'gerber', as in 'gerber file' and it is produced by a software package called Eagle, so there are also 'Eagle' files, which sounds all patriotic and everything until you realize all those web sites you are wanting to be sending your designs to are ALL located in China. So much for American technological prowess. But I digress.

The process in Eagle is that you design a circuit, which is decently challenging if you are not used to that sort of thing, and as you go you determine which physical catalog parts correspond to which circuit element, so you then can lay out a physical design. That is sort of easy, in that sparkfun, and adafruit have parts files available on Github that give you all the information you need, so long as you are using their parts. If you are NOT using their parts then you have to use websites with names like Digikey, and Mouser, which are almost as incomprehensible as the Eagle software itself.

As you explore this you come to realize that to complete a project of any complexity at all you will need to spend a LOT of time coming to know the intricacies of a whole new set of things you will need to know about to succeed, but about which you will never care deeply. It is truly unlikely that you will not need at some point to dip into the larger pool of parts, meaning that at some point you will need to confront the Digikey website and its 638 different packaging options for a 300 Ohm resistor. Like apache PHP plugins before it, the wonders of resistor physical packaging beckon, and you come to realize just how much acquiring that knowledge is going to suck.

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This is the new yellow brick road. But the product is not all software this time, it is physical goods which use software to run. So we are beyond the yellow brick road. Its more sort of a lego brick road. For now we could sort of refer to this, with apologies to the Mockingjay, as the SEAM, for SparkFun (parts), Eagle (CAD SW), Arduino (prototyping platform) / AdaFruit (parts), and Make (empowerment).

And although all this sounds like its just me being lazy and whining, in fact I think the fact that living in the SEAM is difficult to grok to the uninitiated matters deeply, not just to me, but as well to Arduino, and to the whole open source hardware community.

Why? Because over 90% of Americans live within 15 Minutes of a Radio Shack. Because the #1 item requested for stocking at Radio Shack in a recent survey was Arduino. Because ~6,000 radio shack stores will start selling Arduinos later this fall. Because at some point some percentage of their customers are going to get to the end of Arduino value proposition, and want to take the next step, to build something custom and personal and cool, and then they will discover that the next step is neither easy nor obvious, if not, to them, outright hostile and daunting.

The maker movement is about empowerment. The Arduino brand value is about discovery. Sparkfun and Adafruit and the whole maker community ecosystem they are a part of have grown to service the pursuit of those values. Inconveniently, the innovators dilemna when following the maker/arduino path, when living in the SEAM, is that there is a tool chasm you fall into exactly where true empowerment and deep discovery begin

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This feels a LOT like 2001. So while right now this is a bit depressing, its not the end of the world. As the Arduino's emulate their biological cockroach cousins and multiply, from 300k in the world today to 3 Million, to 30 million, to the point where they really are impossible to count and it no longer matters, the number of people reaching out beyond the SEAM will grow as well. That will create economic opportunity, innovation, and at some point this challenge will resolve itself. Its nothing that a well trained cluster of EC2 instances, properly motivated, cannot solve.

The advent of the LAMP stack, an outcome of the Open Software movement, created a critical mass in web software development, and as a result, we got a lot of wonderful tools and capabilities. I think we are at the same place, at the beginning of this cycle, for Open Hardware. I can't wait to see what sort of tools we get from this one.

Ferris wheel - Food Court - Palisades Mall

2011-08-01T18:51:00.001-07:00

One in an ongoing series of ferris wheel videos...
check out the size of that food court. also, for bonus points, see if you can spot the two story carousel way in the back

Holly gets her first deck!

2011-07-23T15:10:00.001-07:00

Since she was very young it has been clear that Holly is going to be 2 things: A heartbreaker, and a sk8tr grrl. since she was 3, yes THREE, she has been asking for a skateboard. After showing us on a scooter that she has some real common sense and can assess risk and handle some speed, I convinced Wendy that Holly is ready to step up.

Of course, with her birthday coming up we didn't actually tell her what we were going to do.

So we had he party today, and then, after it was over, I put my little girl in the car and took her over to the sk8 shop in the mall, and blew her mind:

Many thanks to the staff at Zumiez at Oxford mall in Langhorne for being totally cool and helping a little girl get her wheels on.

Now we just gotta teach how not to kill herself on it...

Holly on her 5th birthday!

2011-07-23T10:41:00.001-07:00

Holly is 5!

Wasp Nest 101

2011-07-18T19:22:00.001-07:00

Last week Wendy told me I need to trim the hedges by our front door. So I was looking at them and discovered something unexpected: a new wasp nest had sprouted basically overnight, and a swarm of wasps was making it their home.

Wasps are amazing creatures and I was sorry there is no easy and safe way to simply relocate them once they have made up their mind to settle. The kids and the dog regularly jump through those bushes, so this was in no way safe. Seeing no option, I immediately launched a pre-emptive strike using the most modern chemical weapons. The result was a complete disaster for the wasps.

After a day or two had passed I removed the nest from the bushes and took the video and pictures below. They are fairly self explanatory and pretty darn cool.

Camp Expressions Day Camp for Children and Teens with Autism

2011-06-29T22:18:00.001-07:00

As we continue to live in Pennsylvania and explore our surroundings, Wendy and I are continually struck by the richness of the culture and how it contributes to opportunities that simply did not exist for us in Canada. This summer we are experiencing this again, and it is an experience worth sharing.

Where we live there is a pervasive summer camp culture for children. Just in our neighbourhood there are sev eral high quality camps, including Camp America, which Holly went to last year. These camps are pretty expensive, $500 or more per week, for which you get experiences for your kids of varying quality.

For Megan summer time can be a bit of a challenge. She thrives in structured environments and does not do well when there is lack of structure coupled with not a lot to do. The school district offers for her extended school year, which is basically a summer program, for Autism kids that require supports. Megan attended that last year. It was awful: basically she spent the summer in a school classroom based daycare. She did not do well and I beleive the lack of proper programs contributed to a behavioural regression that we spent most of the winter having to address.

So here we are again, and given what happened last year, we started looking for alternatives. Little did we know what we would find.

Camp Expressions is a 5 year old summer program that is the result of a teaming up between a social worker, Stephanie DeSouza, and a summer camp operator. The camp is a true clinical environment targeted at children and teenagers with High Functioning Autism. The goal is to give them a high quality summer camp experience while providing appropriate supports and ABA style programs in the area of social skills.

The camp operates on the campus of the George School, a Friends School that has been around for a couple hundred years:

As I said, this a partnership in that the camp is run by camp concepts, who run camps for kids on the George School campus:

The camp staff are drawn from local schools and all are enrolled in some relevant program, be it psych, Autism Therapy, or another specialty. Medical staff are on site full time for meds and things, and what is essentially IEP data is gathered and reported daily.

So we enrolled Megan in this program for a couple of weeks this summer. Enrollment included getting them copies of all of Megan's paperwork, background checks where they called all of Megans' various program providers and her school, and an in person interview where the clinical director and Megan had a F2F conversation on a number of topics. Thorough.

I attended the parent orientation last sunday and took these pictures of the facilities and the school grounds.

As I said at the beginning of this report, I am unaware of any other program like this. The physical environment in and of itself is pretty unique, and the opportunities it affords are extraordinary. For example, apparently there is physical fitness program for the school, itself run by clinical psychologists, that is made available to the older campers free of charge. Amazing.

The schedules for the camp are here:

The programs themselves are run on a reward/positive reinforcement basis. Among other things they do, they offer an annual carnival with rides. They also do a thing they call river stomping, where the kids put on water shoes and go into the local creek to turn over rocks, try to net tadpoles, and generally have a whale of a good old muddy time.

Kids come to this camp from as far away as Turkey, and it is not hard to see why. I will likely blog again on this once Meg has been there for a week or two, but it is apparent already that this is a best practice provider and a model for similiar activities elsewhere. For sure such opportunities for our kids are needed.

Presenting a Demo on Non-linear Ad Insertion at NCTA

2011-06-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

Here I am presenting a demo at NCTA in Chicago this year.

How the Startup Genome Report has helped me understand what I must do

2011-06-03T19:03:00.001-07:00

Startup Genome - Our mission is to amplify the power of entrepreneurs. With the Startup Genome Project we want to do for startups what Pandora did for Music in order to understand how innovation happens at a fundamental level and the spread the knowledge of these principles worldwide.

There are times when you read something, a book or a report, or a blog post, and you immediately get that eerie feeling that it is describing your life. in detail.

The last time that happened to me I was reading Tribal Leadership and it hit me like a ton of bricks how it simply and easily described my work experiences at significantly more than one company at which I had worked. I blogged about it here.

This week it happened to me again.

I read @gigaom and he tweeted about the Startup Genome Project. These guys have taken a data approach to understanding various aspects of startups and how they succeed or fail.

Now, this is interesting to me. In the last 3 years I have

participated in a startup that went bankrupt,
failed to translate a possibly viable founder group into a viable startup idea/activity,
prototyped one startup idea into working code which I then completely failed to pivot,
and blown a 6 month market lead on another prototype idea (what independently of me became google adk) because I was racking up 200k frequent flier miles on my day job instead of soldering wires and writing code.

so its been busy. I've been frustrated. As I have traversed all this I have been paying attention to what is happening to me, and asking a simple question: why is all of this turning out this way, and not another way?

Then I picked up the Startup Genome report and a whole lot of it became very very clear.

First insight: there are multiple types of startups and the founders are motivated very differently.

As a serial entrepreneur wannabe I gravitate toward what the report calls a 'social transformer' type of startup activity. Founders in this activity are motivated by impact and want to change the world. This describes me perfectly. All of my prototyping work is around this type of activity, with network effect driven value propositions built on top of viral-marketing growth curves.

It sort of occurred to me in the last potential founders group I was a part of that maybe we were not all of that ilk, but it is now clear to me that everyone else in that group was seeking a startup of a different type. Because I tend to be a quant I am surveying them on this subject now, but there is no doubt this is true, and no doubt in my mind this is why we failed to find a viable idea to drive toward.

Second Insight: Failure to pivot even once is a strong indicator of failure..
Well duh. and yet, I have to say that the last time I had prototype code, which worked, just really f'ing illustrates this.

I wrote an application, a sort of mashup of a lot of open source stuff with a dollop of @twilio and @twitter, where you could call a telephone number and it would read your @twitter feed to you. Perfect for commuters with speaker phones and unlimited calling.

So what happened? Well, the economics of the app were such that you couldn't really make money. Everyone I spoke to, not invested, wanted me to take that code and modify the product concept to do the same thing using data streaming instead, an approach I disagreed with entirely.

Not one person, including me, ever said "well, what else can we use this for?"

4 months later paper.li got funded. I was one pivot away from the same or similiar functionality, had been sort of aware of the product possibility, but did not pursue it. Instead I dumped the code and started trying to find a new concept with the founder group described in lesson 1.

Third Insight: I can't succeed alone.
I've known this but the data make it clear. If I am to succeed I need a partner. I am probably not a technical founder, I am the guy they refer to when they say 'balanced'. Thats ok, if you beleive, as many watchers of the social network do not these days, that you maybe need some business smarts to make things happen and succeed. Not that I've managed to do that so much in my personal startup activities, but there is ample evidence I can do that if you include the results I drive when I work for others.

The report makes it clear that single founders take a long time and succeed rarely. double down and attempt to do so without a strong mentor and you are absolutely begging for failure. That has been my experience, and so that has been my experience.

So where am I?

Well, @arrington would tell me, as a 45 year old with small kids, to just give up. I have a 2 letter response to that: FU. That leaves addressing the shortcomings I can now identify, and trying again, as the only option. Since I now live in Philly, and my social graph here is extremely thin, it will be doubly challenging to find an appropriate and local co-founder and an equally appropriate and local mentor. But these seem to be the things I must do.

So I will. If you are reading this and think that oner of those roles may be describing you, let me know.

The graphic to the left is from the Startup GEnome website at http://startupgenome.cc/. They are on facebook too at https://www.facebook.com/StartupGenome .

Another way church could probably get with the times

2011-04-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

Cupholders sized for Dunkins? Just saying'

Speaking at light reading in new York

2011-04-27T06:10:00.000-07:00

April 2011

A duplicate name exists on the network

2011-04-19T13:32:00.000-07:00

Error message seen on rental car bus at DFW

Pump 6 by Bacigalupi like Terminal Beach by JG Ballard

2011-04-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Pump 6 by Paolo Bacigalupi on my Kindle. You may recall I read and then commented on his "Windup Girl" earlier this year.

Pump 6 reminds me of nothing so much as the stories in the Terminal Beach collection by JG Ballard.

Ballard is best known, perhaps, for Empire of the Sun, his tale of japanese internment during the second world war, culminating with a near religious experience as he saw the flash of the explosion of the Atomic Bomb exploding over Hiroshima.

If you read the collected works of Ballard you see there recurrent themes: he was fascinated, for instance, by sleep, and time. Many of his stories explore how people react when they are caught up in long slow processes of societal decay. One story, of an humanity that has turned its back on space exploration after determining it is apparently futile, is gripped with a sort of narcoleptic plague which compels the protagonist, representing humanity, to literally fall asleep at the wheel while driving around a devastated and deserted florida.

Pump 6 is very much in this vein. The title story, which is buried in the back of the collection, chronicles the realization by a sewage system worker that the society in which he lives is coasting on the fruits of another era when capable engineers could build and maintain the slowly wearing out infrastructure upon which his modern society is based. Through a slowly diminishing haze of matter-of-course drug use and alcoholism he realizes that, as the massive sewage pumps which he manages break down, there is no one left to call on capable of understanding, let alone fixing, their inner workings.

Again and again in this book, people come to realize that they no longer really understand the situation they are in, or how they got there, or what to do about it. This cycle is conducted by Bacigalupi against the backdrop of a number of timely and compelling thought experiments. For instance, what if, after the singularity, maternity and childbearing were outlawed to prevent overpopulation. Who would enforce that, and how would they feel about it?

This is not an easy book, and you should not confuse the short story genre with young adult fiction. Wives are murdered, children get graphically and casually killed. One story is an extended comparison of the emotional value of keeping a dog versus the nutritional and gustatory value of just eating it.

Pump 6 is the precursor work to Windup Girl, and so there are a couple of stories that provide interesting background on that society. It is clear that the one led to the other, and these stories were made more interesting to me as a result of already having invested in the later work, which blew me away.

In the opening riff the Dalai Lama comes to realize that, during surgery, he has been literally stored on a USB drive, an environment and situation far beyond his control, vulnerable to complexities of fate and society he cannot perceive much less understand. Reading this book is like that. Its hard to endure, but equally it is hard to look away.

Megan in a big bubble bath

2011-03-31T15:18:00.000-07:00

Holly puts the dolls to bed

2011-03-29T05:10:00.001-07:00

Butterfly, by Megan

2011-03-29T05:10:00.000-07:00

Arduino Butterfly

2011-03-27T17:09:00.001-07:00

Arduino Butterfly: ""

So we got the dreaded letter from school the other day: we are reading a robot book; please make a robot for your child to bring to school. Recycle some stuff. It doesn't actually have to work.

I talked to Megan about it; we agreed to make a robot butterfly. For a body we would use a water bottle. The wings would be an old pair of fairy wings: we have lots of those lying around. I dug around and found an old toy from Disney that had some flashing lights on it.

Of course, I'm not sending MY child to school with a robot that does nothing. So I crammed an Arduino into the bottle and wired up the lights so they blink and flash.

Of course, nothing is simple. It turns out that making wings flap with electric motors is a non-trivial problem space. I had a small motor, 3V, but it had insufficient torque to drive a cam and shake the wings. No idea what else to do on a sunday with the project due and me going on the road, so I just ripped the motor out and filed it under problems to be solved some other time. Still, was glad I had gone and gotten the MOSFETs for the motor as the lights were all NOT LEDs and I needed one to drive them.

That meant that even without automated wing action ( I put a pull toy action in instead) I still needed 2 batteries, a circuit board, an arduino, 3 light fixtures, and a power switch in the ass. Crowded bottle.

So, lessons learned:

never talk about what a robot will do until you can demonstrate it doing it. Look on little girls face when she discovered the wings were not going to flap on their own was heartbreaking
There is not robotic problem that cannot be at least partially solved with a glue gun. From mounting motors to attaching the outer skin, priceless. Michael's is an unsung recipient of largesse resulting from the Maker revolution. Buy shares.
Butterfly legs are complicated. Megan, as always, was a strong technical advisor on all things butterfly, from the shape of the bottle required to the fact that not all legs are the same. Who knew?

so now we have a V1 Arduino Butterfly. I do intend to look more into the wings flapping thing. I want to solve it. Looks like I'm probably getting some Adafruit motorshields in the near future.

Mophie Juice Pack Disassembled

2011-03-08T19:57:00.001-08:00

I bought a Mophie Juice Pack for my iPhone 4. 2 Weeks later the mini-USB connector on it snapped off. Seems they have a problem with that.

I wanted to see just why it did that, so rather than go through the hassle of returning it without a receipt, I just bought another one and took the first one apart.

I will admit as well I have an ulterior motive: it looked to me like you could use one of these as a battery to power an arduino-based electronics setup and I wanted to see what was inside so I could see if that was true.

This is what it looked like when I disassembled it. Only a small flat head screwdriver was required.

basically the setup is that the case is a sandwich, which contains a battery between the inner and outer layers.

This is a closeup of the battery assembly:

The battery contains the markings iRice LC404380S 3.7V and a serial #AS0082400200209. On the bottom of the picture is the electronics assembly: I assume most of it is charge regulation circuitry to make sure the battery does not overheat while charging.

On the left is the USB connector. This is clearly connected to the board using soldered joints and nothing more. I consider it a design flaw as one good twist and the thing is going to be toast every time. It should be anchored more securely but space does not seem to allow thos easily to occur so they just punted on it.

On the right is the small plastic part that goes over the power switch.

So, survery says that Arduinos are 5V and this battery is 3.7V. Iffy.

Things daddy likes

2011-02-04T05:11:00.001-08:00

Holly drew this picture for me and taped it to the front door so I would see it when I came home.

On the left is a Wildebeest, on the right a rocket ship. Because Daddy like those. :-)

Good snow in Philadelphia

2011-01-27T05:15:00.001-08:00

Not often we get a decent snow day. Lots of snow days, but snow, usually not so much...

Important NIH Webcast on Viral Cause of CFS

2011-01-26T15:15:00.001-08:00

From Facebook page:
XMRV Global Action

More Info Demystifying Medicine - Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Is there a virus?

http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=9925

The NIH is airing a live webcast and the event can be viewed live at:
http://videocast.nih.gov/

Air date: Tuesday, February 22, 2011, 4:00:00 PM EST

Description: This event will include the presentation of patients,
pathology, diagnosis and therapy context of major disease problems and
current research. The course is designed to help bridge the gap
between advances in biology and their application to major human
diseases. Each session includes clinical and basic science components
presented by NIH staff and invitees. These seminar series are
primarily directed toward PhD students, clinicians and program
managers. All students, fellows and staff are welcome, as well.

Author: Shyh-Ching Lo (FDA), Fred Gill (NIDDK) and Harvey Alter (NIDDK)

Runtime: 120 minutes

Weird error message appearing on airport information displays in Philadelphia and Atlanta

2011-01-21T17:12:00.000-08:00

Saw this error message, "check cooling system", on screens in terminal B in Atlanta and between terminals D and E in Philly. What's up with that?

A Population Analysis of Ontario Provincial Programs for Autism Supports

2011-01-17T18:02:00.000-08:00

For fun, and as a result of a discussion I had with some friends of mine, I decided it would be useful to look at the provision of supports for Autism children in Ontario as a function of the Provincial population and the supposed incidence of Autism within that population. The results of a quick and dirty look were informative.

The method I chose to develop the numbers was very simple. I took the StatsCan population data for Canada, which provides data on live births, and projected the number of Autism Children which would be identified from each yearly batch of newborns. Since there are no actual census data for Autism incidence in Canada (what you measure is what is important to you, what you don't is clearly not?) I estimated the incidence for each year, with the incidence rising in a straight line from 1:150 in 2005 to 1:110 in 2010.

Using these estimates, I was able to calculate roughly the number of children by Province, the number of Autism children by Province, and to break these estimates into two cohorts of children: those aged 2-5 and those ages birth - two years of age.

The rough spreadsheet I created is below:


2	Incidence Rate = 1 in	150	140	130	120	110
3
4		2005/2006	2006/2007	2007/2008	2008/2009	2009/2010
5
6	Canada	346,082	360,916	370,931	377,929	381,382
7	Newfoundland and Labrador	4,526	4,495	4,516	4,472	4,480
8	Prince Edward Island	1,329	1,428	1,388	1,397	1,397
9	Nova Scotia	8,479	8,675	8,834	8,799	8,810
10	New Brunswick	6,869	7,127	7,117	7,067	7,044
11	Quebec	78,481	83,108	85,608	88,500	88,400
12	Ontario	133,775	136,980	139,031	140,390	141,784
13	Manitoba	14,270	14,842	15,397	15,638	15,990
14	Saskatchewan	12,178	12,523	13,406	13,739	14,122
15	Alberta	43,193	47,558	49,691	51,454	52,937
16	British Columbia	41,192	42,379	44,061	44,578	44,497
17	Yukon	344	354	355	360	366
18	Northwest Territories	707	686	730	735	739
19	Nunavut	739	761	797	800	816
20
21		2005/2006	2006/2007	2007/2008	2008/2009	2009/2010	Children <2	Children 2-5	Total	50% of Kids 2-5	Receiving	waiting	data as of
22	Canada	2307	2578	2853	3149	3467	6617	7739	14355
23	Newfoundland and Labrador	30	32	35	37	41	78	97	175
24	Prince Edward Island	9	10	11	12	13	24	30	54
25	Nova Scotia	57	62	68	73	80	153	186	340
26	New Brunswick	46	51	55	59	64	123	151	274
27	Quebec	523	594	659	738	804	1541	1775	3316
28	Ontario	892	978	1069	1170	1289	2459	2940	5399	1470	1446	1609	October 14, 2010
29	Manitoba	95	106	118	130	145	276	320	595
30	Saskatchewan	81	89	103	114	128	243	274	517
31	Alberta	288	340	382	429	481	910	1010	1920
32	British Columbia	275	303	339	371	405	776	916	1692
33	Yukon	2	3	3	3	3	6	8	14
34	Northwest Territories	5	5	6	6	7	13	15	28
35	Nunavut	5	5	6	7	7	14	16	31
36

When examining service provision I only have data for Ontario. Perhaps others can take this example and perform local analysis relevant to their own Provincial situation. In the case of Ontario we have documented numbers that show 1,446 children receiving service and 1,609 children waitlisted as of October 14, 2010. (in fact the october #'s were actually quoted then but taken at the end of June, so these are mid-year 2010 statistics.)

If you think about incidence of Autism as a Bell Curve, with the most severely affected children falling at one end of the curve and the less severely affected at the other, then the picture that emerges is that the Ontario Government is funding services for only those children at the more severe end of the Bell curve, with the services provisioned equal to approximately 50% of the children in the 2-5 age bracket. I say this as the spreadsheet shows that 50% of the age 2-5 cohort is 1,470 children: in fact 1,446 are actually receiving service today.

Of course, it is a little more complicated than that as children may receive service even after they enter school in some cases, meaning that not all children receiving services are in this age bracket. As well, children receive cutoff notices if they are too severely affected to respond to therapy in what the Government determines is a timely manner, meaning that the half that are serviced are likely somewhat down the curve as a cohort, though still clustered toward the severe end.

Still, the numbers are clear that the budget is approximately equal to half of the kids in this age bracket.

This makes sense in a way: Governments like mathematical projections when doing budgets; in situations like this they likely call in epidemiologists (Doctors who study the incidence of disease in populations) to provide them with projections they can use to set appropriate levels of funding. Given what is known today about Autism, our projection here is probably a close approximation of what an epidemiologist would predict. The decision to fund to half the number, in the absence of incidence data suggesting a less than perfect bell curve for the severity of impairment or need for supports, would represent a pragmatic approach to the balance of need and affordability.

In this case the spreadsheet shows trouble looming: the incidence is going up and as a result there are almost as many children already born who will be diagnosed with Autism as there are already in the system. This implies the need for new funding just to keep up.

Also of interest in this analysis is that it explains the $25M in new funding for community programs recently announced by the Provincial Government. If you are on the less severe side of the bell curve it is unlikely you will ever receive supports. But there is a reasonable requirement for help by those who fall on this side of the curve; by providing minimal ( and minimally expensive) programs on basic skills the Government strives to provide to each "according to their need". According to the Province up to 8,000 children may fall into this category. We would need to see population data from 10 or more years back to really understand how this number might have been arrived at.

Based on this analysis a few things become clear:

we have a possible explanation for why the funding level is set where it is
we have a possible explanation for the new funding that has just been announced

it is also become more clear that arguments of social justice will fail to entice the Government to raise the level of funding. To change the level of funding you will need to show that, clinically, more than half the children on the bell curve of severity require supports.

Otherwise the pragmatic balancing , based on population data and epidemiological analysis, will trump emotional arguments of social justice every time.

Windup Girl in same category as Neuromancer, Oryx and Crake, Anathem

2011-01-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

There is a moment in Neuromancer, the [1984] novel by William Gibson that first fully defined cyberspace, that unwittingly showed the now current topics of Science Fiction. At the time that it was released there was really no internet, characters ran around in a future that required looking for payphones, as wireless telephony had not yet really been productized, and the focus was on a cyberpunk movement that stressed medically implemented body modification and the japanification of world commerce. Neuromancer was, in its moment, a perfect mirror of the society from which it sprang.

In the novel there is a scene where the main characters, Molly and Case, are in the Topkapi market in Istanbul. In the market is a stuffed horse, standing on display. Horses in this world are extinct, the victims of an equine virus that arose suddenly and had no cure. The implication was that the virus may have been engineered. The moment was incidental to the plot and quickly forgotten, but it was a seed that has since grown and flowered into a significant body of literature.

When I was in University one of the English Professors, Peter Schwenger, in addition to teaching Kiddy Liter, had a course on apocalyptic Literature. I did not have a chance to take that course, but we did spend a lot of time talking about it. I was taking Poli Sci courses on nuclear disarmament, which were pretty apocalyptic in and of themselves, so it was a natural subject of discussion.

Apocalyptic Literature has variously throughout history been the chronicle of our worst fears, from rampaging deities far from our control, to foreign influences and immigration fears, to the threat of war and nuclear holocaust. Science Fiction has often been apocalyptic in nature, as by definition the best science fiction is politicial and social commentary on the times when it was written. One need only read Starship Troopers (war with China), the Forever War (Sexual Revolution in the time of the VietNam War) or 1984 (Fear of Communist Dictatorship enabled by a surveillance Society) to understand that the best Science Fiction becomes literature precisely by using the context of the future to expose the universal and timeless anxieties of today.

The equine disaster of Neuromancer foreshadowed one set of fears that is extremely current today: the fear of genetic disease, the development of genetic technology, and the consequences of manipulating genetic materials to create artificially-derived actors in the human ecosystem.

The link between Internet technologies and business models, and the dangers of genetic modification and medical research, were effectively linked together by the Canadian Margaret Atwood in her stunning novel "Oryx and Crake". Here the Internet Boom-time has been followed by a genetic Engineering boom-time resulting from business-model-innovation driven investment in the creation of a variety of artificially designed mass market "products" that are in fact genetically engineered organisms. Fast Food, Designer gardens, and organ transplant businesses all come under scrutiny. Hackers, mirroring the darwinistic evolution of the artifically created life for,ms they are manipulating, resist the seemingly unstoppable 'progress' toward a completely ungenuine world that the productization of biological products is relentlessly delivering by become domestic urban terrorists, progressively escalating in violence from the splicing of genes into bacteria so they will destroy roads by eating the asphalt, to the creation of bogus sexual enhancement product food supplements that ultimately result in the almost complete slaughter of human society.

It was interesting to me to note that 2600, the hacker quarterly 'zine published in New York, had an article in one of its editions about a year after Oryx and Crake came out, in which the ease and fun of gene hacking was described, with a complete description of where to find the chemicals required to start splicing genes in your basement. Coincidence?

It is also interesting that Audrey Niffenegger, in her first novel 'The Time Travellers Wife', used public anxiety over the outcome of the Human Genome Project, wittingly or otherwise, by using a rare genetic illness as her major plot device. Although the movie apparently sucked (I have not seen it) as the producers thought it was a love story, this tale of dealing with genetically-driven lifelong illness (in this case modeled on the outcomes of childhood onset diabetes) was a powerful essay on how such illnesses ultimately impact families as loved ones ultimately succumb to mortal illness which, however effectively mitigated, has always, their whole life, been ultimately beyond their control

Recently Windup Girl by PAolo Bacigalupi was named by Time Magazine in the top 10 Sci Fi books of 2009. This tale further extends the meme that the fruits of genetic manipulation are unpredictable, dangerous, and the outcome of rational corporate behaviour. In this book companies bearing a passing resemblance to Archer Danields Midland release genetically engineered crop diseases into the wild as a means of reinforcing monopolies in genetically modified pest- and disease- resistant seed stocks. Not limited to foodstuffs, artificially engineered human diseases are also released, creating instant markets for vaccines and treatments.

Of course, these genetically engineered organisms immediately begin to evolve and interact with the environment in all sorts of unintended ways, ultimately resulting in mass slaughter of humans, almost complete species extinction of most varieties of plants and many animals, and a resulting loss of most of the genetic diversity of the planet.

Bacigalupi explores all of this from the perspective of a developing nation struggling to remain independent of the machinations of the 'calorie men' from the US midwest. Interplaying and connecting the calories in foodstuffs with the energy requirements of daily living in a post-peak-oil world, the book ties together neatly the major anxieties of climate change, energy security, First World abuse of third world economies in the quest to arrest and control carbon emissions, and the fear that the fruits of 'progress'in science and technology will lead to moral, political, and ultimately societal collapse.

The common theme to all of this is an assumption or belief that scientists, misconceiving their moral duty and imcompetently understanding the potential impacts of their efforts, will at best inflict serious, perhaps mortal harm, upon humanity. This will be driven either through unintended consequences resulting from their actions, or through the provision of access to greivously harmful capability to morally bankrupt individuals or corporations. At worst, it is feared, they will, directly or otherwise, kill us all.

Neal Stephenson, in his book Anathem, explores the structure and consequences of a society where fear of such outcomes manifests itself in a distrust of scientists that has become so pervasive, and the fear of the fruits of scientific inquiry has become so great, that society acts violently to preserve itself before the really bad stuff happens. Scientific inquiry is stripped of technology, and practitioners of scientific inquiry are physically segregated from society within walled institutions from which they may only infrequently venture. Periodic pogroms ensure compliance with this arrangement by those held within.

This vision is relevant commentary in a current American culture where self-described 'common' people revel in denial of 'global warming' during snow days while remaining completely ignorant of the actual processes and limitations of scientific inquiry into subjects like climate change conducted almost wholly behind closed doors in university labs sponsored by too big to fail corporations.

Importantly to this discussion, Anathem indicates a realization that ultimate disaster is not inevitable, that civil society can take regulatory steps of various kinds to balance progress and control in the pursuit of relatively long term stability. Stephenson convincing makes this argument by describing steps of a radical and drastic nature, setting an outer boundary on what might be possible.

While I am fairly sure that Stephenson intended this work as a warning of the Darwinistic outcome of such strategies and how they make societies competitvely unfit over long periods of time (think pre-Spanish Inca or Pre-British China), in the context of the other works examined here, such outcomes begin to look absolutely positively desirable by comparison.

A final thought on all this is the interesting observation that in all of these instances it is assumed by the characters involved that it is science that must be regulated, and not business. This is consistent throughout history, at least since the times of socrates and galileo (yes, the catholic church is also a large business...) In a world of too big to fail, there is a fundamental desire on the part of some that business be somehow regulated to prevent business-driven economic disaster. The failure to regulate is seen by some as inexplicable. Based on this survey, I would argue that failure to be a recognition of an intrinsic human belief that regulation of business can never really be effective. What will inevitably come next is not regulation of business, but rather attempts to regulate the technology they use. Look for it. It's coming.

These are all extremely good books and you should read them:

[neuroimmune-xmrv-alliance] Full Transcript now available from Blood Products Advisory Committee Meeting; Harvey Alter's Closing Remarks

2011-01-11T23:34:00.001-08:00

This email pretty much speaks for itself.

Thanks Jill for passing it on.

From: jill.justiss
Date: Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 1:46 PM
Subject: [neuroimmune-xmrv-alliance] Full Transcript now available from BPAC Meeting; Harvey Alter's Closing Remarks
To: neuroimmune-xmrv-alliance@yahoogroups.com

This is from xmrv global action on facebook but I have copied and pasted below for those of you who are not on facebook. Check out what Dr. Alter had to say,it's very good:

The official transcript of the entire Dec 14 Blood Products Advisory Committee Meeting is now up at:
http://www.fda.gov/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMeetingMaterials/BloodVaccinesandOtherBiologics/BloodProductsAdvisoryCommittee/ucm239304.htm

From DZ, with thanks: Included are the full presentations (sans slides) by Drs. Hanson, Mikovits (on the UK study), Rachel Bagni (on the development of assays for XMRV at the NCI), and Lo. Included is the full transcript of the final Q&A session. To read the section you want, just click the appropriate page number in the Table of Contents.

Below find the full statement by Dr. Alter that closed the session. This was previously reported (with amazing accuracy) by ValB626 on the ME/CFS forums, but the actual thing deserves to be passed around again. I have bolded a few statements that we had not (I think) previously heard, and have taken the liberty of correcting (in brackets) what appears to be the mistaken transcription of the term IAP as "IPA". (Btw, after the Q&A you get to read the discussions about the vote to recommend banning CFS patients from donating blood, and who voted yea or nay).

***********************
DR. ALTER:

"Since Dr. Lo had to leave early, I felt I had to come up and do some defense of him and Judy as well. I think, when a group finds a new agent, they become biased that this agent is real. When another group doesn't find an agent, they become, I think, even more biased that the agent is not real. That leads to this kind of contentiousness.

I think our goal should be not to bring the other side down, but to find the truth. I think the truth will out over the next year, with studies that are already planned.

At this point I concur that we have no evidence for causality. That's going to be very difficult to come by, especially when we are detecting at the limits of detectability and when assay performance is very critical to get equal results.

But I still want to counter by saying I think the current evidence for disease association is very strong, even though not universally confirmed. But it has been confirmed now in at least four studies, two of which were presented today, that either XMRV or a polytropic MLV is associated strongly with chronic fatigue syndrome. A point that I think was misrepresented today: In those labs who do find the agent, it is very reproducible. Judy has found the same patients to be positive by culture year after year. We have found a patient to come back after 15 years and still be positive. So this is not a single, isolated finding. It's confirmed by sequencing. It's reproducible over time.

Dr. Hanson has shown today how critical the assays are. When she tweaked her assay, she went from no findings to findings almost identical to the Lo lab. The diversity is now being confirmed also in the original WPI group. XMRV isn't the only agent even in the WPI lab.

Despite the very legitimate concern for contamination -- I think this is a serious issue -- there have been hundreds of negative controls in the same laboratory that are always consistently negative. An extremely sensitive mouse mitochondrial DNA has always been negative in the Lo laboratory. Lo has done the [IAP] assay that Dr. Coffin recommended. That is also negative. There just has been no evidence for contamination. Although you could say maybe the negatives could be negative somehow and the positives positive for contamination reasons, it really is not logical that that would be so.

I'm not a molecular biologist. I defer to Dr. Stoye, who is world-renowned in that area. But just as a simple doctor, it seems to me that you have used single-case anecdotal evidence to knock down the various possibilities. I just want to make a case to the committee that you can't -- your conclusion is that anything can happen in assays, and therefore it probably has happened this time. I think using that kind of anecdotal probability is not valid to negate reproducible data from four different laboratories. So at least keep that in mind.

Lastly, I'm not a chronic fatigue doctor, but I have learned a lot about chronic fatigue in the last six months and have spoken to a lot of patients. I'm absolutely convinced that when you define this disease by proper criteria, this is a very serious and significant medical disease, and not a psychological disease. It has the characteristics of a viral disease. It usually starts with a viral-like illness. If XMRV is not the causative agent -- and it may well not be -- there is still need by other groups to look for the next agent which may be the case.

Sorry to take so much time."

Some Completely Unfounded Speculation That The U.S. is Already Building a Space Elevator

2011-01-08T22:58:00.000-08:00

I had some time on a very long flight recently so I took the opportunity to get caught up on the topic of space elevators. To do so I downloaded Space Elevator Systems Architecture [Kindle Edition] by Peter and Cathy Swan and read it while flying over a very frozen Hudsons bay.

This book was written partially under a grant from NASA. It was obviously motivated politically, as several sections of it contain key messages which are repeated several times, the repetition obviously deliberate. It was written in 1995, which makes it interesting as an artifact in time, and while it is nominally a systems engineering tract it in fact contains no math, no proofs of any kind. It is a documentation of a conclusion already reached.

So what conclusion does it document and what does it all mean?
Here is my relatively uneducated take on matter.

Space exploration is relevant to national or global security in 3 major ways:

access to raw resources, including sources of energy as well as valuable materials
military supremacy through holding of the "high ground"
survival of humans as a species by providing diversity of inhabited locations

There is, of course, a fourth aspect, which is global security against other species, but until Wikileaks releases the UFO cables we won't take this aspect too seriously for this discussion.

As a spacefaring country, the United States has long held the 'high ground' through fundamental command of orbital positions around the earth.

Recently other countries such as China and India have announced space programs aimed at placing people on Lunar surface. This represents a threat to US National Security as the Moon is, after all, the very highest ground, and you cannot exactly shoot it down in a time of conflict. So settlements by other countries on the Lunar surface are a real concern.

In the middle of the last decade the Bush Administration was confronted with these developments. There was a real requirement to mount a credible response. The outcome of that was the Constellation program, designed to build new rocket-based heavy lift capability and use it to place humans, Americans, back on the moon and eventually on Mars.

But lets get real, the real purpose of this program was to assert some notion of manifest destiny and remind aspiring nations that when they get to space, when they get to the Moon or Mars, Americans are already there.

Constellation was nothing short of an exercise in dominance behaviour.

None of this is covered in the book, and in fact I could be misreading all of this. Tell me if I am. But I don't think so.

In that context, there is another subtext to this story that is made clear by the text of the book. That is the story of how Constellation was a decision made in the absence of any viable alternative, whose usefulness has now been superceded by newer technologies.

Lets review:

It is clear, and was clear decades ago, that the use of chemical reactants as fuel in rocket craft to propel payloads into orbit is not cost effective. The metric referenced in the book is the cost today of about $25,000 per Kilogram of payload delivered to Low Earth Orbit, with significant additional cost to move beyond that very lowest edge of space. The magnitude of this cost, coupled with the one time use nature of the vehicle technology involved and the sheer logistics of replicating the incredibly complex and dangerous craft required for use in this manner makes even spending that amount of money difficult. There are not many business cases that can produce a return when confronted with such logistics and business models.

In this context comes into play the concept of a space elevator. in a series of conferences in the early part of the decade many serious people looked at the technology and economics of space elevators and made some interesting basic conclusions:

they are economically and technically viable in concept to build and maintain
the project profile of what it takes to build one is not that different from activities in your garden variety terrestrial megaproject
Space elevators hold the promise of a delivery cost of payloads to orbit in the $100 / kilogram range
they hold additional infrastructure benefit in their ability to provide natural motive power sufificent to deliver objects to virtually any location in the solar system without requiring craft to provide additional motive power of their own.

The immediate fundamental requirements for a space elevator to be viable are identified in the book; there are three:

the ability to manufacture a carbon nanotube ribbon of identified strength with a manufacturing reliability in excess of nine-sigma
the ability to remove from low earth orbit any and all objects which could damage the ribbon once in place
the identification of a safe location to place the base infrastructure from which cargo would be hauled up the ribbon.

It is stressed in the book numerous times that chemical propulsions systems are economically not viable to support meaningfully sustained space based activity, and that the economics of a permanent lift infrastructure could address this insufficiency within a project scale smaller than some other current megaprojects and with a relatively small price tag in the low hundreds of billions of Dollars.

Time moves on, Governments change. NASA holds some x-prize contests. Many of these are focussed on things like building climbers and transfering power to them. Others are focussed on the removal of space junk using innovative means like autonomous vehicles that can capture, collect, and contain such objects for deorbit.

Then the unthinkable happens:

As part of a NASA review, the Obama administration cancels the chemical rocket program and announces it is no longer in the launch business. Government effort is now focussed on what you do after you get there: there is a fundamental assumption that orbit is reachable, and has been made so by private enterprise.

At this point you should be saying "wait a minute. we just established that chemical rockets are not cost effective. why would private enterprise get into that business? And hey, China and India are still going to the Moon. What gives?"

the answer is that companies like SpaceX are entering the launch business today because Government is getting out. So private enterprise is stepping up, but it is an ephemeral opportunity. Not long term viable is not long term viable.

That must mena that the real action is elsewhere. So where?

In the middle of the last decade, when Constellation was funded, Carbon nanotubes had just been discovered. It was unclear that fabrics woven fron this material would possess the tensile strength required to support a space elevator infrastructure, or that such materials would be manufacturable with the necessary quality. In this environment, there were no viable alternatives to chemical rockets. But statements had to be made; Corners had to be pissed in: hence you get Constellation.

Clearly something has shifted in the time since. Of the three requirements, ribbon, junk removal, and location:

the location question was settled almost immediately, with a determination of an ocean region west and slightly North of the Galapagos Islands.
X-prize activity has proven the junk removal issue is executional and mostly requires investment, which the build of an elevator would justify.

Which leaves the ribbon.

Although I pay attention to such things when I can, I have seen no announcements of manufacturing breakthroughs on the ribbon material. As noted, the requirement is a fabric made of carbon nanotubes manufactured to a reliability in excess of nine-sigma. This is dictated by the scale of the thing: you are building a banner longer than 35,000 miles long using a nano-material. In such a case even small errors pile up quickly. so in the place of data on this I speculate. Again:

Chemical rocket based access to space is uneconomical and non-sustainable.
The Asian Countries are still going to the moon.
In America it is private enterprise, who only do economical things, who are now responsible for delivery of payloads to orbit
The only way known to humans to do that is a space elevator.

This leads me to speculate that someone has told the Obama administration they have cracked, or can crack in a known time period, the ribbon manufacturing problem and as a result American private enterprise can build a space elevator. As a result the Obama Administration have cut off our Government sponsored development of new heavy lift vehicles and are diverting those resources to other challenges, like a permanent settlement on the moon, a staking of the high ground, assuming that the lift required will be available on some time frame which is known but not yet announced. In the meantime SpaceX is a bridge, supported so we are not left totally without domestic lift capability, something we do realistically need for at least a little while. The lack of announcement in this context is probably appropriate. It is, after all, a complicated and rather unbelievable matter of national security.

So. if you do believe this, and I will position this whole train of thought as interesting speculation, then basically you believe that it is the U.S. National, but unannounced, policy

to secretly fund and support a new Manhattan-like project,
with the goal of building what is essentially a Panama canal into space,
which will give us a 2500% advantage in lift economics over any other nation, an advantage that cannot be overcome without construction of a similiar facility of their own,
returning to the US an unapproachable dominance over space for a generation,
and providing economical access to the material riches of the solar system without competition or serious constraint.

There is of course no proof, just a bunch of dots you can assemble in all sorts of ways. But if true it would be literally marvellous, for the United States at least.

I wonder if there are jobs for non-engineers on such a project as that...

Wakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent

2011-01-06T05:12:00.000-08:00

This will doubtless cause a lot of noise this week.

what is important to remember is:

this does not mean that vaccines don't sometimes cause Autism in some people some small amount of the time. As an agent of our environment, it is quite possible they sometimes cause this to occur
the major study that started people thinking about that possibility wasn't major, was based on falsified data, and didn't prove that it does.
in fact, there has been no study that shows that it does, so its possible, but the incidence is quite likely pretty low.
since we do not know what really does cause Autism, we should keep an open mind and follow data and science to the best of our ability. Today, most of what we know is based on opinion and conjecture and that cannot be a good thing.

http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452.long

In a series of articles starting this week, and seven years after first looking into the MMR scare, journalist Brian Deer now shows the extent of Wakefield’s fraud and how it was perpetrated (doi:10.1136/bmj.c5347). Drawing on interviews, documents, and data made public at the GMC hearings, Deer shows how Wakefield altered numerous facts about the patients’ medical histories in order to support his claim to have identified a new syndrome; how his institution, the Royal Free Hospital and Medical School in London, supported him as he sought to exploit the ensuing MMR scare for financial gain; and how key players failed to investigate thoroughly in the public interest when Deer first raised his concerns.

Whittemore Peterson Institute Patent Application Implicates ME/CFS and Autism as Conditions Possibly Caused By XMRV

2010-12-28T18:48:00.000-08:00

To WPI at least, the possibility that Autism and a whole string of other diseases and conditions are caused by XMRV is strong enough to warrant a play for patent protection. Et voila, here we are: http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?IA=US2010039208&DISPLAY=DESC

It should be noted that the dates of priority on this registration are all mid 2009 and early 2010:

Latest bibliographic data on file with the International Bureau

Pub. No.: WO/2010/148323
International Application No.: PCT/US2010/039208
Publication Date: 23.12.2010
International Filing Date: 18.06.2010
IPC: C12Q 1/70 (2006.01)
Applicants: WHITTEMORE PETERSON INSTITUTE FOR NEURO-IMMUNE DISEASE [US/US]; 6600 N. Wingfield Parkway Sparks, Nevada 89436 (US) (All Except US).
MIKOVITS, Judy, A. [US/US]; (US) (US Only).
LOMBARDI, Vincent, C. [US/US]; (US) (US Only).
RUSCETTI, Sandra, K. [US/US]; (US) (US Only).
RUSCETTI, Francis, W. [US/US]; (US) (US Only).
Inventors: MIKOVITS, Judy, A.; (US).
LOMBARDI, Vincent, C.; (US).
RUSCETTI, Sandra, K.; (US).
RUSCETTI, Francis, W.; (US).
Agent: BLOSSER, G. Harley; G. Harley Blosser, Reg. No. 33650 Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP P.O. Box 061080 Wacker Drive Station, Sears Tower Chicago, Illinois 60606 (US) .

Priority Data:
61/268,933 18.06.2009 US
61/225,000 13.07.2009 US
61/225,877 15.07.2009 US
61/228,616 26.07.2009 US
61/228,624 27.07.2009 US
61/249,486 07.10.2009 US
12/575,467 07.10.2009 US
61/318,392 29.03.2010 US

The widening of the viral targets from XMRV specifically to a broader family of MLVs had not yet happened. Not sure at this point what that broadening will mean to this application

In any case, if you look at the list of diseases or disorders in para 14 below, the net is cast widely indeed:

Title: DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF DISEASES OR DISORDERS ASSOCIATED WITH XENOTROPIC MURINE LEUKEMIA VIRUS

Abstract: Methods of detecting, diagnosing, monitoring or managing an XMRV-related neuroimmune disease such as chronic fatigue syndrome or XMRV-related lymphoma such as mantle cell lymphoma in a subject are disclosed. These methods comprise determining presence, absence or quantity an XMRV immunopeptide, an XMRV antigen, or an XMRV nucleic acid in a sample from a subject. Therapeutic methods of treatment with anti-retroviral agents are also disclosed. Further disclosed are assays for testing compounds having activity against XMRV.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

[0012] One aspect provides a method of detecting, diagnosing, monitoring or managing an

Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus-Related Virus (XMRV)-related neuroimmune disease or an XMRV-related lymphoma in a subject.

[0013 ] In some embodiments, the method includes detecting presence, absence, or quantity of an XMRV antigen, XMRV immunopeptide, or XMRV polynucleic acid in a sample of the subject. In some embodiments, the subject is a person having, suspected of having, or at risk for developing an XMRV-related neuroimmune disease or an XMRV-related lymphoma. In some embodiments, the subject exhibits signs and/or symptoms of a neuroimmune disease and/or a lymphoma.

[0014] In some embodiments, the neuroimmune disease is selected from the group consisting of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Parkinson's Disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Niemann-Pick Type C Disease, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and chronic lyme disease. In some embodiments, the lymphoma is selected from the group consisting of a XMRV-related Mantle Cell Lymphoma (MCL) or a Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia lymphoma (CLL). In some configurations, the neuroimmune disease is selected from the group consisting of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).

So what does all this mean? It needs to be remembered that you can apply for one of these pretty defensively, before you have any conclusive proof that what you are claiming is true. Having the application in allows you to protect the potential for profit while you explore how large that potential actually is.

So while there is a lot of excitement about this application being made public, in fact it represents little in terms of understanding the state of the science and what has been proven or disproven with respect to the conditions that inform our daily challenges...

Thanks to Jennifer Hankinson for posting this on the Yahoo group neuroimmune-xmrv-alliance. This list is invaluable for XMRV news thanks to efforts from members like Jennifer.

Luggage like from 'Joe versus the Volcano'

2010-12-28T16:38:00.001-08:00

... On sale at restoration hardware, for when things get interesting, from a luggage point of view...

ABA vs Any Other Autism Treatment: Because it Works

2010-12-24T16:55:00.001-08:00

Pretty much sums up my feelings about the ongoing debate between whether or not kids should be provided therapies based on the scientifically proven methods of ABA, or other therapies for Autism which are based on no science at all.

xkcd: Sickness: "http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sickness.png"

Kids these days ...

2010-12-23T19:22:00.001-08:00

Megan sings a short song she learned at school which perfectly illustrates how much Christmas has changed since we were kids. I don't know about you, but I know exactly how it would have ended if I had walked around the house singing this little ditty when I was her age.

We're all bad parents now.

YouTube - Kids these days ...: ""

How you want to be remembered after you are dead

2010-12-23T19:05:00.001-08:00

These grave stones were photographed at St Peter's Anglician Church in St George, Bermuda.
I think it is fair to say that the people described made a big impression on those around them,
to be memorialized in such a fashion.

Having lived in several small communities,
I know how rare it is to encounter people whose very presence makes your existence there seem more worthy.
These were clearly two such people.

Contact Information for Autism Supports in Bermuda

2010-12-23T16:46:00.001-08:00

Ford Launches Auto SDK for Voice Control of Apps

2010-12-23T06:03:00.001-08:00

Om Malik follows this.
Its an interesting play, but basically additive of development on existing apps.
Which is interesting.
We should ask ourselves: will there be a Lotus 123 or Twitter that every car must have?

: "Ford's AppLink Syncs Smartphone Apps and Developer Profits

Ford today launched the AppLink software for its 2011 Fiesta car that links a smartphone with Ford%u2019s voice-activated SYNC system. With Ford%u2019s SYNC AppLink installed in a car, a driver can control specific third-party applications on a nearby smartphone by speaking to the automobile. AppLink will initially support three smartphone apps on Apple%u2019s iOS, Google%u2019s Android and Research in Motion%u2019s BlackBerry platforms, with additional applications expected to be compatible with AppLink in the future.

Linking phones with cars is nothing new; since many municipalities are creating hands-free laws for safety, the availability of Bluetooth support in an automobile is becoming commonplace. But Ford%u2019s AppLink isn%u2019t a simple built-in Bluetooth connection for hands-free phone conversations and contact dialing. Instead, AppLink is actually installed to the SYNC system by a consumer, which may be a first. Ford is creating a platform with SYNC, one that developers can leverage when creating smartphone applications.

The first three apps leveraging AppLink come from the original software partners Ford named in January: Pandora%u2019s streaming radio service, Stitcher%u2019s mobile news stream and OpenBeak, a Twitter client specific to BlackBerry handsets. AppLink doesn%u2019t just offer simple, basic control of the smartphone apps; Pandora users, for example, can take various actions through speech control, says Ford:

%u201COnce linked to Pandora, SYNC users can access their favorite personalized radio features, including creating and choosing stations, bookmarking songs for purchase, and giving songs a thumbs up/down all through voice. Command structure is intuitive and simple: %u201CPlay station classic rock radio,%u201D %u201CBookmark song,%u201D %u201CThumbs up%u201D or %u201CThumbs down.%u201D

Getting cars to control smartphone apps through speech recognition like this ought to be appealing. According to a Consumer Electronics Association survey, 55 percent of smartphone owners prefer voice commands as their user interface for in-car smartphone integration. Aside from the consumer desire and benefits of intelligent, safe, voice-activated smartphone apps through a system capable of recognizing over 10,000 first-level Ford SYNC commands, developers stand to win as well.

In April of this year, Ford detailed plans for the AppLink APIs, and I suggested then that smartphone apps that use them could offer a value-add against competing apps that don%u2019t integrate with an automobile. Consumers that can easily link Pandora with a car and control it through the SYNC voice system, for example, might be more apt to choose Pandora over Slacker, Rhapsody or some other media streaming application.

Developers can%u2019t overlook the fact that this type of market offers a large opportunity: More than 2 million Ford vehicles have the current SYNC system and while only the 2011 Fiesta currently supports AppLink, Ford is sure to keep its foot on the gas pedal and add to the list of models that can work with smartphones in the future."

(Via http://gigaom.com/2010/12/22/ford-sync-applink-pandora-voice-command/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29.)

XMRV and CFS: It's not the end

2010-12-22T19:41:00.001-08:00

Big hooha today over the release of some studies on XMRV and potential lab contamination during testing for it. Out of it all came this extraordinary blog posting by Vincent Racaniello, of the Virology Blog. Seems that the need for the news cycle to get instant quotes does not square with the need to research and reflect to truly understand complex material. In this case he provided a quote and then later realized that the words he provided did not square with a more fulsome understanding of the materials he quickly reacted to.

At the end of the article, which I am entirely reposting below, he says: "if I had difficulties interpreting these papers, how would non-scientists fare?".

Exactly. Lets all be careful, ok, so nobody gets hurt....

XMRV and CFS:It's not the end: "XMRV and CFS:It's not the end

22 December 2010

Yesterday the Chicago Tribune published my reaction to the four papers on the retrovirus XMRV published this week in the journal Retrovirology. I was quoted as saying "These four papers are probably the beginning of the end of XMRV and CFS". I wish to retract this statement and explain my reasons for doing so.

Early Monday a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Trine Tsouderos, sent an email asking for my thoughts on four XMRV papers that had just been released (paper one, two, three, four). I read all four papers and decided that they raised serious concerns about the role of XMRV in human disease. Specifically, the four papers demonstrated different ways that assays for XMRV could be subject to contamination with murine viral sequences. I wrote an email to Ms. Tsouderos outlining my summary of the papers, and later that day her article was published. My statement was reproduced exactly from the email I had sent her, so I was not misquoted.

I then set out to write about the papers for my blog about viruses. I read the papers over again, and began checking XMRV sequences in Genbank. I also began an email correspondence with authors of three of the four papers, and spoke with my virology colleagues here at Columbia. As a consequence of this additional research I decided that my initial impression of the papers was incorrect, which is evident in my post entitled %u2018Is XMRV a laboratory contaminant?%u2018. Almost immediately after publishing the piece readers began to ask why my comments to the Chicago Tribune had such a different tone. I concluded that a retraction and explanation were necessary.

Upon re-reading three of the four Retrovirology papers it became clear to me that they show that identification of XMRV can be fraught with contamination problems, but they do not imply that previously published studies are compromised by these findings. Clearly any new studies done on XMRV should keep in mind the potential for contamination from PCR kits and murine nucleic acids.

I was initially more troubled by the fourth paper by Hue and colleagues. There are four major findings in this paper (gag PCR primers are not specific for XMRV; the virus is present in 5 human tumor cell lines; two XMRV isolates are nearly identical to a virus from the human prostate cell line and also contain an insertion from the murine retrovirus MoMLV; and there is more nucleotide diversity in viral sequences from 22Rv1 cells than in all the patient XMRV sequences). The fact that two XMRV isolates seem to be laboratory contaminants %u2013 judged by the presence of MoMLV sequences %u2013 was initially unsettling until it became clear that other XMRV isolates do not have this insertion. That leaves the fourth finding %u2013 that XMRV from 22Rv1 cells appears ancestral to, and more diverse than, all the human XMRV sequences. I decided that this result was less troublesome than I had originally believed, in part because it is not clear that the differences among the 22Rv1 viruses did not arise during PCR amplification.

My conclusion is that these four papers point out how identification of XMRV from human specimens can be complicated by contamination, but they do not mean that previous studies were compromised. They serve as an important reminder that future experiments to identify XMRV need to be appropriately controlled to ensure that the results are not compromised by contamination.

In other words, these four papers are NOT the beginning of the end of XMRV and CFS. Rather, research on the role of this virus in human disease must proceed, with large, case-controlled epidemiological studies, as suggested by others.

I would like to apologize to anyone who was offended, angered, or disappointed in any way by my statement to the Chicago Tribune. It is my goal to educate the public about virology, and clearly I did not do that very well.

There are at least two lessons that you can take away from this incident. First, that I make mistakes, and that I'm willing to admit it. Everyone does, including scientists. Second, if I had difficulties interpreting these papers, how would non-scientists fare?"

(Via http://www.virology.ws/.)

XMRV: Treatments Expected In This Coming Year

2010-12-22T19:16:00.001-08:00

In this video, which I was turned on to by the "xmrv alliance: neuroimmune-xmrv-alliance@yahoogroups.com" mailing list, Dr. Judy Mikovits makes the statement "we expect treatments in this coming year".

Listen all the way to the end.

Thanks to Jennifer Hankinson for posting...

From: Jennifer Hankinson email redacted

To: xmrv alliance: neuroimmune-xmrv-alliance@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wed, Dec 22, 2010 7:58 pm

Subject: [neuroimmune-xmrv-alliance] Today's interview with Dr. Mikovits and Annette Whittemore

Nevada NewsMakers Wednesday, December 22, 2010 Broadband Video

Update: here is a link to the interview mirrored on YouTube:

Incredible Augmented Reality App Brings Real Time Visual Translation Magic

2010-12-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

This app represents an extraordinary vision realized in current technology.
Staggering and useful, solves a hard and real problem elegantly.
Just WOW.

Ontario Government Admits Thousands of Children Harmed By Policies

2010-12-14T20:33:00.000-08:00

The Ontario Government led by Dalton McGuinty today admitted that more than 8,000 children with on the Autism spectrum have been harmed by its lack of support for a comprehensive ABA program.
The admission came in the form of an announcement for $25 Million in new funding.
Seeking to continue and improve its track record for refusing direct responsibility for the creation and maintenance of effective and comprehensive programs offering ABA-based therapies to the thousands of Ontario children in need, the programs announced today stressed a community delivery model for a vague set of services and modules, the efficacy of which could not be explained, and the need for which was unclear.

In a press release forwarded to parents by Autism Resolution Ontario, an advocacy group working to improve Autism services, the Ontario Government stated:

"Starting late next spring, communities across the province will offer new services and supports for children and youth with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Approximately 8,000 kids with ASD will benefit annually from new Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA)-based services, which will help them develop communication, social and daily living skills and manage better in school. This is in addition to the intensive therapy already benefiting 1,446 children and youth under Ontario’s Autism Intervention Program."

Under the McGuinty Government the wait list for ABA-based therapy provided by the Ontario Autism Intervention Program for children with Autism has grown to more than 1,500 children, a number larger than those receiving services.

The announcement today did not reference this wait list policy, nor did it address the practice, endorsed by the Government, of withdrawing services from children who do not respond to therapy in a manner that meets a set of restrictive criteria.

This rationing of care has left thousands of Ontario families to fend for themselves, faced with the prospect of paying for expensive therapy services routinely provided by other neighbouring jurisdictions.

In announcing that more than 8,0000 children may benefit from today's announced funding, the McGuinty Government unwitting admitted that the programs currently in place lack comprehensiveness and require significant improvement. In spite of this, a significant amount of the funding will go to long term research and new expert panels.

A spokesperson for the Ontario Autism Coalition described the funding announcement as "vague and frustating". "Why another panel? The focus today was on the what, not the how. But very little detail on 'the what' was discussed. The lack of services in Ontario is already well documented. This says nothing about the waiting children who need ABA today, or the comprehensive lack of supports in schools. The waiting children of Ontario are left with more questions than answers about how this will help them develop and grow."

Autism Resolution Ontario can be found at http://www.autismresolutionontario.com/

The Ontario Autism Coalition can be found at http://www.ontarioautismcoalition.com

The announcement by the Ontario Government can be found at http://news.ontario.ca/mcys/en/2010/12/ontario-helping-more-kids-with-autism-and-their-families.html

--30--

Teddy is going nowhere...

2010-12-13T04:43:00.000-08:00

Delayed at PHL by a frozen airplane. This Teddy bear is at the next gate over, left behind, and interestingly, ignored by all. Obviously nobody thinks that US Air Express flights to the frozen Midwest are much of a target...

Montage - xmrv autism

2010-12-12T16:14:00.001-08:00

It was only a matter of time before more offerings like paper.li became available. The newest one is Montage. If paper.li is focused on the twitter feed, MOntage appears to be a Bing search publisher. It's also very graphically pretty, sort of the US News to the Paper.li Inquirer.

To test it, I created a page on XMRV and Autism. you can find that page at:

Montage - #xmrv #autism .

Any comments are welcome.

SpaceX first private company to reach the final frontier

2010-12-08T16:31:00.001-08:00

This is exciting: private companies are finally reaching space, holding the promise of innovation, tremendous cost reduction, and someday, zero gravity sex holiday weekends, something that NASA, no matter how hard it tried, was never going to deliver.

Way to go guys: what you do is benefiting all mankind.

YouTube - SpaceX Falcon 9 Flight 2 Launch Webcast:

A Frightening Look At The Labor Market Recovery (CHART)

2010-12-05T16:15:00.001-08:00

Another look at the scariest chart ever. Still scary.

A Frightening Look At The Labor Market Recovery (CHART):

Thanksgiving at Valley Forge

2010-12-04T11:55:00.001-08:00

Every Year we have a family tradition that we go over to Valley Forge and walk around for a while. The kids like it, we all get to be outside together, and Valley Forge is interesting historically, and just as a park.

Here are some photos we have collected doing this the three thanksgivings since we have come here...

Chaza's Autism Centre Video

2010-11-25T17:17:00.000-08:00

A short video by Chaza Attar, discussing her school for Autism children and the approach they take. Chaza is an amazing therapist and helped Megan tremendously in her early years. I strongly encourage you to have a look and will happily put you in touch if you think she can help.

santa 2010

2010-11-21T08:57:00.001-08:00

santa 2010, originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

best santa picture ever!

Huffington Post: CANCELED By CBS

2010-11-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

		CANCELED By CBS
	CBS has officially canceled "Medium," it was announced Thursday. The five-year-old paranormal thriller, which stars Patricia Arquette, will have its final episode on January 21....

Sent from my iPhone

This Is Why We Need Astronauts

2010-11-15T17:07:00.001-08:00

This Is Why We Need Astronauts:

Amazon Launches GPU-enabled Instances

2010-11-15T06:41:00.000-08:00

Been waiting for this for almost 2 years. This is the bomb. The machines being used are optimized, among other things, for video transcode. I *wish* I was still in a startup where this would be relevant. It would be really really fun to take these for a drive and see what they could do....

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Cluster GPU Instances
Instances of this family provide general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) with proportionally high CPU and increased network performance for applications benefitting from highly parallelized processing, including HPC, rendering and media processing applications. While Cluster Compute Instances provide the ability to create clusters of instances connected by a low latency, high throughput network, Cluster GPU Instances provide an additional option for applications that can benefit from the efficiency gains of the parallel computing power of GPUs over what can be achieved with traditional processors. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.

Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large 22 GB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet
EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

Cluster GPU Instances
Quadruple Extra Large $2.10 per hour N/A*
* Windows is not currently available for Cluster Compute or Cluster GPU Instances.

Entrepreneurism is America is Not Dead Yet...

2010-11-14T11:48:00.000-08:00

As the song says, the children are our future. All we need now is a
web site, a yelp account, a Twitter feed, maybe some search engine
marketing, and we'll be all set....

Or maybe we'll just set up by a busy road on a hot day. Whatever
works, right?

Fan Trailer for Enders Game Movie

2010-11-09T18:27:00.001-08:00

Thanks to IO9.com for pointing this out; essentially a mashup of scenes from several other movies that adds up to a single statement: hurry up already and get this movie made!

Nova Scotians get bored, start playing with Twitter

2010-11-04T21:45:00.001-07:00

On their way to being millionaires already. Tatamagouche will never be the same... Seriously: built in Nova Scotia, a happy Twitter map mashup...

Map My Followers:

"

(Map embed could use some help, though...)

Meg and Holly 2010 11

2010-11-04T17:42:00.001-07:00

Meg and Holly 2010 11, originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

bad photoshop of the kids school photos...

Susan and I get Interviewed on Family Caregivers Unite

2010-11-01T15:47:00.000-07:00

Tuesday at 10 AM Pacific Time on VoiceAmerica Variety Channel

Family Caregivers Unite!

Needs of Children with Autism

Susan Fentie-Pearce is the mother of Keith and Kyle. Malcolm Stanley is the father of Megan. All three of these children have autism. Susan and Malcolm talk about their professional backgrounds and their experience as family caregivers for children with autism. They discuss the challenges they have met and continue Learn More >>

Missed the Live Shows? Past Episodes are available On Demand and Podcast Ready.

Listen Live to VoiceAmerica Variety

Be sure to tune in to Family Caregivers Unite! with Dr. Gordon Atherley Tuesday at 10 AM Pacific Time on VoiceAmerica Variety Channel

Log on to Listen:
http://www.voiceamerica.com

Questions? Comments?
Call: 1-866-472-5788

Warning Signs of the Autpocalypse from the PA Bureau of Autism Services

2010-10-31T08:12:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Ambry Ward for passing this along.

I've said before that PA has it unusually together when it comes to Autism services.H is more proof.

In some places I have lived (that would be you, Ontario), there is active denial of the need to plan and provide services on a greatly and constantly increasing level for individuals with Autism. Rather than measure the need and follow the data, they increase by small percentages based on previous allocations.

What they are missing is that we are living through the beginning phases of the Autpocalypse, a period of time when the number of children with Autism will rapidly and overwhelmingly increase, and the number of new adults exiting the education system and requiring services from mainstream agencies will also increasing in a drastic, almost non-linear fashion.

Of course, this does not have to be a crisis: anticipating the need for compassionate responses to demographic issues is just good planning, and in Pennsylvania, that is what we seem, so far, to have. You will never be able to say, here, that they did not size up the challenge or understand the need.

Sure, the actual availability of services, especially in less prosperous areas, is still very much an issue. But at least the need to provide those services, now and in the future, is recognized.

Such activity is the hallmark of responsible government. It is a shame that more jurisdictions, both in the US, and in other countries like Canada, cannot follow suit...

Bureau of Autism Services :

To follow up on the message from Holly Kofsky, Chair, Adult Services Committee, ASA Philly, the PA Autism Census Report 2009 may be of interest.

To access the entire PA Autism Census Project Final Report, create an account at the PA DPW Bureau of Autism Services Training & Resource Center at http://bastraining.tiu11.org/

"Although the projected rise in adults with autism is staggering, the good news is that Pennsylvania has already developed autism-specific programs to begin meeting the growing need. Continued support of these programs and the individuals served by them is vital so that the resources will be available in order to meet this need."

We are pleased to share with you the Pennsylvania Autism Census Project Final Report!

Why was this study conducted?

The PA Autism Task Force noted that the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders was unknown due to a lack of a comprehensive approach to track these individuals. In response, we conducted a study to estimate the number of individuals in the Commonwealth living with autism spectrum disorders. This is the first study of its kind inPennsylvania.

The purpose of this study was to obtain an estimate of the number of individuals living with ASD in Pennsylvania as well as to learn about demographic characteristics of that population. The intention was to reveal the scope of need for autism-specific services and programs and to inform policy development and the design of effective services.

Findings:

According to the study, in 2005 there were close to 20,000 Pennsylvanians living with autism. Given trends, we expect that number to rise to at least 25,000 by 2010.

The report also illustrates that the number of adults with autism will increase dramatically in the near future,growing by 179% to more than 3,800 in 2010 and to more than 10,000 by 2014.

Please note the report includes county-specific information which we hope will be helpful in effectively planning for the future at both the state and local levels.

In order to print the report, please click on the printer button within the document. Selecting File/Print from your toolbar will result in blank pages. Please consider the environment before printing the complete report.

What needs to happen?

Although the projected rise in adults with autism is staggering, the good news is that Pennsylvania has already developed autism-specific programs to begin meeting the growing need. Continued support of these programs and the individuals served by them is vital so that the resources will be available in order to meet this need.

We hope that the results of the census will inform decision-makers at local, regional and state levels and encourage all stakeholder groups to work together to begin discussing the impact it will have on your communities.

Thank you for your continued interest in supporting individuals with autism and their families.

Attack Ads, Circa 1800 - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

2010-10-30T20:28:00.001-07:00

Really funny as heck. I totally approve these messages...

Attack Ads, Circa 1800 - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:

(Via .)

Laura McIntosh Lays It Down On The Lack Of Autism Supports In Ontario

2010-10-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

Laura Kirby-McIntosh is a friend of mine. We share the experience of having children with Autism. Well, sort of. Laura lives in Ontario, we live in Pennsylvania. As I have blogged many times before, our experience could not be more different.

In order to understand fully this piece she wrote and emailed around recently, it is good to watch this video I recorded a couple of years ago, during a Provincial election campaign, where she takes apart Michael Bryant, then a Cabinet Minister, and one of the most powerful members of the Provincial Government, at his own campaign rally:

So Laura has a powerful voice. Which makes this message that much more distressing:

On 2010-10-25, at 18:35, Laura Kirby-McIntosh wrote:

No, it's not getting better. Sorry
by Laura Kirby-McIntosh

As the mother of a child with autism, I’ve seen my social circle shrink over the last ten years. I’ve fallen out of touch with friends and family while I devote all of my spare time to fighting for the services my son needs. It’s no one’s fault, really—it’s just hard to go out for a coffee or invite someone over for dinner when you live with someone with autism, and that reality takes a slow but steady toll on social relationships. I’ve learned to live with it, and many people who were a huge part of my life in the past have now drifted away.

Every once in a while I’ll bump into one of them, and we struggle to make conversation. Lately, these encounters have been increasingly difficult for me. These well-meaning friends will inquire after my son, comment on some of the activism I’ve been engaged in and say something totally well-intentioned, like “So…how’s your son doing? He’s doing better, now right?” Or they might refer to the news and venture something hopeful like, “Yea, I saw something about autism on TV a while back. The government’s doing more to help, eh? So things are getting better, right?”

At this point, I usually feel like running away or banging my head against a wall. I can’t express my frustration properly, and sometimes it overwhelms me. I’m not frustrated with the well-meaning friend at all. I know they care, and that helps a lot. But I just can’t stand having to answer, yet again, that things are NOT getting better. I’m so desperately tired of being the bearer of bad news, of being that chronically depressing person that is still struggling just as much as the last time we talked. I’d love to tell them that things are improving, but that would be a lie. I want to tell them that all our efforts lobbying the government and raising awareness have somehow made a difference, but lately I’m having trouble making myself believe that.

In 2005 my husband and I helped to found the Ontario Autism Coalition, a grassroots group dedicated to putting political pressure on the provincial government to help those living with autism. In the last 5 years, we’ve held over 24 rallies across the province, met with dozens of MPP’s and cabinet Ministers, organized petitions, written letters and taken our story to the media. This past year, we put together a Recommendations Report for the government, outlining specific policy initiatives that would make the lives of individuals with autism and their families more humane. We’ve used every kind of mainstream political activism I know of, and a bit of creative protesting, too.

So why don’t I feel proud? Well, because things really aren’t getting better. Not in any meaningful way for those living with autism 24/7.

The sad reality is that the waitlist for IBI therapy is still 2-5 years long. Parents continue to bankrupt themselves at three to four times the rate of the rest of the population while borrowing money any way they can to pay for private therapy. Those lucky enough to actually receive government funding for treatment find that funding cut off for any and every reason imaginable.

It’s also true that the vast majority of children with autism are encountering a school system that is ill-equipped to deal with them. Parents are routinely asked to keep their kids home by school administrators overwhelmed by the challenging behaviours students with autism often present. And for all the high-paid Autism Consultants hired by school boards and the millions of dollars spent on ABA training, very little tangible help has made it to the actual classrooms of autistic students. Our own son is currently only able to attend school for 1.5 hours a day. Although he’s “high functioning” and verbal, the experts from our school board have found it incredibly difficult to program for him appropriately since he began to exhibit aggression in the last year.

Supports in the community are still very difficult to access. At times, I feel buried in an endless pile forms and paperwork required by no less than four different Ministries we have to deal with. We’ve been turned away from programs because our son’s IQ is too high, called crisis lines that forward to answering machines and been denied services because autism is apparently not a “medical” condition. Accessing the respite services we so desperately need is very challenging—funding for programs like Special Services at Home have been frozen for years, and other agencies jealously guard their funding allotments by making their criteria so narrow that only a very limited group of families can possibly qualify.

There are no crisis services for individuals with autism. There’s no facility that you can go to if your kid suddenly regresses or becomes violent over an extended period of time. Heck, there’s nowhere to go if your kid becomes violent just once and you reach the point where you can’t keep him safe on your own. This year, I learned the hard way that the last place you should ever go with an autistic youth experiencing a severe meltdown is a hospital emergency room. Hospitals simply won’t take our kids—even hospitals with international reputations for helping young people have told us that they simply can’t handle kids with autism who are acting out. I’ve been offered plenty of prescriptions for my son, but have been sent home from Emergency rooms time and time again.

Once, when I refused to take my son home, I was told that my only other option was to give him over to Children’s Aid. Two months later, I thought we had won some kind of small victory when he was admitted to a Children’s Mental Health Unit at another Toronto hospital. It turns out that staff there had very little experience with autism, and they were quite unprepared to deal with our son. He spent most of his time either sedated or in physical restraints—an experience that traumatized him and sent him into a tailspin.
We can’t even drive past that hospital now without my son becoming extremely agitated.

Parents want nothing more than to raise their disabled children at home. Most people would agree that the days of institutionalization are best left in the past. But unless families are given the supports they need to care for their children, the burden is too much to bear. Some find themselves in a place where they have no choice but to look for a group home or residential facility. But once again, the waitlists are almost endless.

This past summer a friend of mine was told by Ontario’s former Minister of Finance that if she wanted to get her son into a residential facility quickly, she should consider having her son criminally charged so that a judge could issue a court order for treatment. What was offensive was not just the suggestion, but also the reality that as a society, we’ve let it come to this.

Faced with inadequate services and supports, parents are essentially being told that unless we can find a way to do it all ourselves, our choices are to turn our kids over to the Children’s Aid or to the criminal justice system. Really? Is that the best we can do?

So to the cousins I haven't called in years, the friends I've long since lost touch with, the colleagues who try so hard to be supportive, the students I've taught, and and all those who have been disappointed with me in one way or another:

No, I’m sorry. Things aren’t getting better.

I wish I could tell you differently.

ArduCopter Quad v1.0 KIT, Full Electronics

2010-10-21T16:35:00.001-07:00

This is an example of how open source can change the world. $499 for a fully kitted autonomous quadrotor helicopter. Unheard of. I wonder how long it will be before we see this scaling up to human size? I don't think long.

I can currently think of a dozen neat things you could do with this, all of which could be money making, off the top of my head, NOT EVEN TRYING.

These guys have done something hard, and useful, and are making it accessable to everyone. These guys are heros.

ArduCopter Quad v1.0 KIT, Full Electronics: "ArduCopter v1.0 - Fully featured UAV multirotor

Pre-Orders are open again!!!

This KIT contains almost everything you need to enter to world of multirotors. You only need to add your own Radio, Rx/Tx modules and Battery, every thing else is provided on this kit.

Frame set is based on famous ArduCopter Quad design by Jani Hirvinen and his team on DIY Drones and manufactured by Fah Pah Electronics.

What ArduCopter is? ArduCopter is a multirotor amateur UAV development platform and is meant for DIY people. Even if you are not a software developer or 'hacker' who want to tune everything, you can still enjouy this community product. It also allows people to built their own looking mini UAV or just an ordinary R/C toy, all depends on it's owners needs. You can also program everything on it by your self or use software that is developed by DIY Drones community. Software is updated almost daily.

Fah Pah is only part of this software development group at DIY Drones. Support for it is provided on their website on ArduCopter forum areas.

ArduCopter Quad v1.0 KIT Contains (hardware):

* 1 x ArduCopter v1.0 Frame as seen in DIY Drones
* 4 x Motors designed to ArduCopter use, 850kv
* 4 x ESCs designed to ArduCopter use, 20Amp
* 4 x Propellers designed to ArduCopter use, 10x45
* 1 x ArduPilot Mega Flight controller board
* 1 x ArduPilot Mega OilPan IMU board
* 1 x Connectors/Cables between APM + IMU
* 1 x MediaTek 3329 GPS + 10 cm Cable

Everything else not listed here are optional and ArduCopter can be expanded with them of users can build their own expansions.

This KIT is a DIY kit, to assemble it you need to have basic soldering skills to solder ESCs cables/Connectors, Power distribution PCB and it's connectors, basic mechanical skills and knowledge to build whole frame.

Add only: Radio, Receiver and Battery to make it flying

Documentation can be found from ArduCopter's GoogleCode repository

Shipping starts: Estimated on 1st week of November

Shipping: Fixed $45 USD shipping with EMS to ensure fast and reliable delivery. This packet ships alone.

* Due this is a DIY Drones community product, most of technical details and other data will be kept on ArduCopter Wiki pages at Google Code. So please check from there all latest technical and other data.

General specs of ArduCopter
o Size: 24' from Motor to Motor (with smaller arms 18')
o Weight: 950gr

Average flight times:
o 3S 2200mAh LiPo, 9-10 mins with no payload
o 3S 2650mAh LiPo, 9 mins with 300gr video camera payload

Features

* ArduCopter Platform, Software development roadmap
* Due this is a opensource commity project, we can only provide main software development roadmap. This is not a list of what software is capable currently, for current features please check DIYDrones.com website.
* * 6 Degree of Freedom IMU stabilized control
* * Gyro stabilized flight mode enabling acrobatics (loops and barrel rolls)
* * GPS for position hold
* * Magnetometer for heading determination
* * Barometer for altitude hold
* * IR sensor integration for obstacle avoidance
* * Sonar sensor for automated takeoff and landing capability
* * Automated waypoint navigation
* * Motor control using low cost standard PWM Electronics Speed Controllers (ESC's)
* * On board flight telemetery data storage
* * Mounted camera stabilization capability
* * Wireless command & telemetry for long distance communication
* * Capability to fly in '+', 'x', quad, hexa and octo configurations
* * Battery level detection
* * User configurable LED flight pattern
* * Capability to use any R/C receiver
* * ArduCopter Configuration and Ground Control Software
* * Realtime graphs of flight data
* * GUI for configuration of PID and other flight parameters
* * On Screen Display (OSD) integration, (coming)
* * Waypoint programming using Google Maps, (coming)
* * Mixertable view to auto configure '+', 'x', quad, hexa and octo configurations, (coming)
* Due this is a community product, features can change without any notice!"

(Via .)

Tube maps | Transport for London

2010-10-21T15:51:00.001-07:00

Tube maps | Transport for London: This is just fun. At least, it was this morning.

The Underground challenge today was to get from Canada Water to Paddington (express train to Heathrow) without going through Waterloo.

Perfect Soundtrack Song for Zero History by William Gibson a.k.a @GreatDismal

2010-10-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

Ignore the video for this song and focus on the words. This song describes the feelings of every female character in the last 3 William Gibson books for Bigend, the motivating character of the triplet. It's brilliant and makes me want to make a movie about it all just so I can use this as the soundtrack...

here are the books if you have not read them yet...

PCR and serology find no association between xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and autism

2010-10-16T19:46:00.001-07:00

Here is an abstract for the Autism/XMRV study that was released this week. Pretty cut and dried. Lets see if there is a response on methodology, as has happened previously with other negative studies...

PCR and serology find no association between xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and autism: "PCR and serology find no association between xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and autism

Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) is a retrovirus implicated in prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Press releases have suggested that it could contribute to autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

In this study we used two PCR assays and one antibody assay to screen 25 blood samples from autistic children born to mothers with CFS and from 20 mixed controls including family members of the children assayed, people with fibromyalgia and people with chronic Lyme disease. Using a real-time PCR assay, we screened an additional 48 South Carolina autism disorder samples, 96 Italian ASD)samples, 61 South Carolina ASD samples and 184 healthy controls.

Despite having the ability to detect low copy number XMRV DNA in a large background of cellular DNA, none of the PCR assays found any evidence of XMRV infection in blood cells from patients or controls. Further, no anti-XMRV antibodies were detected, ruling out possible low level or abortive infections in blood or in other reservoirs.

These results imply that XMRV is not associated with autism.

Author: Brent SatterfieldRebecca GarciaFiorella GurrieriCharles Schwartz
Credits/Source: Molecular Autism 2010, 1:14"

(Via .)

Controversy Surrounds Retrovirus/Vaccine Link to Autism

2010-10-16T19:42:00.001-07:00

It will be interesting to see the response from Mikovits et al regarding the methodology used in this study...

Controversy Surrounds Retrovirus/Vaccine Link to Autism: "SOURCE: Cooperative Diagnostics, LLC

Oct 14, 2010 17:54 ET
Controversy Surrounds Retrovirus/Vaccine Link to Autism

GREENWOOD, SC--(Marketwire - October 14, 2010) - Some parents and medical professionals are contemplating treatment of autistic children with toxic drugs based on findings that are potentially false. In a joint study released today in Molecular Autism, Cooperative Diagnostics and the Greenwood Genetic Center showed that Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus-Related Virus (XMRV) was not found in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This finding is in direct contrast to previous statements by Dr. Judy Mikovits, corresponding author of the October 2009 Science publication implicating XMRV in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). According to Dr. Mikovits, in addition to finding XMRV in CFS patients, they found XMRV in a 'significant number' of autism spectrum disorder samples and speculated that 'this might even explain why vaccines lead to autism in some children.'

The study conducted by Cooperative Diagnostics and the Greenwood Genetic Center analyzed 230 autism samples and 204 healthy controls. There was no evidence of XMRV infection in any of the samples, including the autistic children of mothers with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, in spite of using the most sensitive XMRV DNA test published (10 to 25x more sensitive detection limit than the XMRV test in Lombardi, et al) in addition to confirmatory antibody testing. Antibodies are the body's natural defense against infection and are produced upon exposure to a virus. Antibodies are present even when viral levels are too low for detection with DNA tests. The absence of antibodies against XMRV is a strong indicator that not only were the patients not infected with XMRV, but they were likely never even exposed to the virus.

'When the first reports circulated that a retrovirus might be associated with autism, we were excited that the cause of at least some cases of ASD might finally be elucidated,' said Dr. Brent C. Satterfield, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of Cooperative Diagnostics. 'However, when we found that XMRV was not even casually associated with ASD, we became concerned that autistic children would be treated with anti-retrovirals based on what increasingly appear to be false positive reports.'

About Cooperative Diagnostics, LLC

Founded in 2008, Cooperative Diagnostics is a privately held company that uses proprietary engineering models to develop custom solutions to molecular diagnostics problems in global health ranging from oncology to infectious disease testing. Real-time PCR tests (DNA tests) currently offered internationally include tests such as HIV, Hepatitis B (HBV), Hepatitis C (HCV), Dengue and Malaria. For more information visit www.codiagnostics.com.

About the Greenwood Genetic Center

Since 1974, the Greenwood Genetic Center, a nonprofit institute, has been providing clinical genetic services, laboratory testing, and developing educational programs and materials. In 1985, research began on intellectual disabilities and birth defects and in 1996, research began on autism. The Greenwood Genetic Center works closely with the South Carolina Department of Disabilities and Special Needs to provide diagnostic services, treatment, and prevention programs to reduce the risk and severity of disabling conditions.

Cooperative Diagnostics, LLC
(864) 229-1567
Email Contact

"

(Via .)

CFS Science Reviews: Stuart Legrice Overview of XMRV Research

2010-10-16T05:55:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal for pushing this up in this article here.

The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Advisory Committee is the equivalent of the Inter-Agency Autism Advisory Committee at the NIH. They have been energized by the emergence of XMRV, and as a result their quarterly meetings are a lot less sleepy now.

There is a large amount of distrust of government science in the CFS community; this presentation is unlikely to change that.

The community is looking for a presentation that talks about all the positive studies that show how CFS is caused by XMRV, and how as a result, anti-retroviral treatment trials are starting which will cure everyone afflicted.

Clearly, this presentation is not saying all that. The main points of the presentation are these:

the entire XMRV discovery could still boil down to lab contamination in samples being tested
until we eliminate contamination as an explanation for what we are seeing, we cannot be certain that XMRV or any other MLV is in people, and not just showing up in test tubes in labs
as a result of this doubt, we are a long long way from any treatment or cure of anything, because we are not even sure what we have found is real

There is a lot more detail on the studies performed, what they yielded, and what it all could mean, but the bottom line is that the contamination thesis needs to be eliminated and until it is, the XMRV hypothesis, attractive as it may be, will remain under a cloud.

The NIH website does not allow for the embedding of video clips (why?) so I cannot embed the video here. Click through to this link: CFS Science Reviews to watch the presentation. Click on the item "XMRV - Dr Stuart Legrice" to go directly to the XMRV presentation.

U.S. Won't Recover Lost Jobs Until March 2020 At Current Pace

2010-10-09T15:29:00.001-07:00

The picture says it all, but you can click through it if you want the words as well...

U.S. Won%u2019t Recover Lost Jobs Until March 2020 At Current Pace:

(Via .)

Megan Soccer Magazine Cover

2010-10-07T15:03:00.001-07:00

Megan Soccer Magazine Cover, originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

It's Soccer Photo season. Here is Megan in hers...

The Market of Post-Developed America

2010-10-03T18:36:00.000-07:00

One of the big issues in setting carbon targets for the world is the challenge set out by the emerging world to the developed world to reduce their emissions. The developed world is scared that, if the emerging markets develop along the same path they did, there will be neither enough carbon to support the billions of people who are now coming out of poverty and seeking basic human comforts (and more), nor enough ability to soak the emissions they will produce in the process. Disaster, either way. The emerging world recognizes that if developed countries do not reduce their own reliance on carbon, the same result is inevitable.

Makers, hackers of low cost and practical solutions to basic challenges, seem to have adopted the emerging markets as a source of inspiration; Africa, in particular, seems to be their muse. The Maker ethic: do-it-yourself, sustainable, repairable, reproducable, is well suited to drive mass innovation in products appropriate for markets with large numbers of very small bank accounts. The top-down world bank megaproject approach seems to have failed; bottom up approaches show success, if of modest scale, and the makers are the spiritual and real world cousins of community bank and livestock projects. Solving basic human needs in a sustainable fashion, in their philosophy, is the entree to organic development for the entire region.

So what kinds of projects? Well, again, the kinds that meet basic needs. Lighting and cooking technology that does not require carbon-based fuels. Medical equipment made from readily available car parts. Water purification technology instantiated in simple tea bags. Cold storage for food that relies on evaporation and nothing more.

Arianna Huffington has recently started a community endeavour called 'Third World America". The point is, and this is me embroidering, in many places in the country that is rich enough to consume and emit more carbon than any other, the standard of living is slipping to, or even below, that of many countries in the emerging world.

In other words, the technology approach and product outcomes of the maker ethic are now appropriate, and even becoming necessary, in areas of America. As the costs of maintaining the aging carbon-intensive infrastructure currently in place overwhelm the ability of America to pay, this approach will become even more necessary if we are to halt this slide in our standard of living.

Neal Stephenson, in his recent book Anathem, describes a world where large regions are in a state of post-development; failing economically, as populations migrate elsewhere, they are harvested for invested commodity metals and materials which may be re-used elsewhere. There is an impression that such investments may be minimized when made in new areas, to make more efficient the later, inevitable harvest that will cyclically almost certainly come.

This description is not just of a distant planet; this is a description of urban developed areas in America like Detroit. We are at the beginning of learning how to harvest materials from urban areas we are abandoning. Counter-intuitively, we are making these areas more like developing parts of the world, with available wireless connectivity and minimal physical infrastructure to be maintained by Governments of marginal economic power. Such environments today are not viable, do not support acceptable quality of life, in a world which continues to rely on carbon for basic needs like heat and light. Inventors and Makers are required to reduce that reliance, unleashing economic potential from crushing physical infrastructure maintenance requirements, and eliminating the concomitant carbon emissions that will eventually make our entire global environment unsustainable.

This is the definition of a new emerging market, the market of post-developed America. It comes with a new definition of development: investment in carbon-free technology to provide basic human needs, and integration into a minimal set of common supply chains to maintain and extend that investment. It is enabled by a bottom up methodology of innovation and productization. It implies that any activity we undertake which improves the quality of life for people in other emerging markets will serve to improve the quality of life for people right here, in the post developed market we are now growing at home.

I noted this in a blog post a while ago:
There is a great quote on twitter today, as quoted by Mathew Ingram:
Dan Lyons says instead of doing something useful or hard, too many startups are making social widgets and games: http://bit.ly/aQ26TG

The development of products suitable and appropriate for the emerging market of post-development America seems both useful and difficult. Perfect.

GigaOM: Ford Embraces the Cell Phone

2010-10-01T17:39:00.001-07:00

Not sure where I heard it, bit someone has recently said that the car is the next great mobile device, albeit one you get into...

: "Mobilize 2010: Ford Embraces the Cell Phone
By Katie Fehrenbacher Sep. 30, 2010, 11:49am PDT

There's no question that the connected car ( adding broadband connectivity and applications to vehicles ) will be a massive market opportunity. But there are two diverging scenarios for the connected car ecosystem, one is dominated by embedded computing in the vehicle, the other is led by cell phones. At GigaOM's Mobilize conference on Thursday, automaker Ford said it's solidly coming down on the side of the cell phone.

We've put all of our chips on the non-embedded strategy, said Ford's Doug VanDagens, Director, Connected Services. The computing power is in the device and in the cloud, we're not putting computing power in the vehicle, said VanDagens. Designing hardware for the 10 to 15 year life of the vehicle would just be too hard, compared to the couple year life span of cell phones and applications.

Ford has partnered with Microsoft on its Sync broadband software platform, and already offers 911 assist, traffic information and navigation services. VanDagens says Ford works with virtually everybody from the wireless companies, to content partners, and even Apple.

How will all of these cars get connected? According to Steve West, Vice President of Emerging Technology and Media, for Alcatel-Lucent, 4G is the perfect network to handle the tall order of connecting hundreds of millions of cars. 4G is designed for data, while 3G is still voice centric but with data included, said West. 4G will fundamentally transform the auto industry and the driving experience, from enabling wireless-based behavioral insurance rates to in-car infotainment, said West."

Why Wesabe Lost to Mint - Marc Hedlund's blog

2010-10-01T17:29:00.001-07:00

A founder bluntly and simply discusses failure and success and what makes the difference between them. Some universal truth in here, applicable to a wide range of products and activities...

Why Wesabe Lost to Mint - Marc Hedlund's blog: "Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could; we completely sucked at all of that."

Evidence ADHD is Genetic and Similiar to Autism and Other Neurological Conditions

2010-09-30T13:57:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe this is a first.

Study finds first evidence that ADHD is genetic
Health »
By Kate Kelland

LONDON | Thu Sep 30, 2010 4:54am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists have found the first direct evidence attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a genetic disorder and say their research could eventually lead to better treatments for the condition.

Researchers who scanned the gene maps of more than 1,400 children found that those with ADHD were more likely than others to have small chunks of their DNA duplicated or missing.

Anita Thapar, a professor psychiatry at Cardiff University who led the study, said the findings should help dispel the myths that ADHD is caused by bad parenting or high-sugar diets.

"This is really exciting because it gives us the first direct genetic link to ADHD. Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to those of other children," she told reporters at a briefing about the findings.

ADHD is one of the most common child mental disorders and is estimated to affect around 3 to 5 percent of children globally. It is seen far more often in boys than in girls.

Children with ADHD are excessively restless, impulsive and easily distracted, and often experience difficulties at home and in school. There is no cure, but the symptoms can be kept in check by a combination of medication and behavioral therapy.

Millions of people take ADHD drugs including Novartis's

Ritalin, known generically as methylphenidate, Johnson & Johnson's Concerta, Shire's Adderall and Vyvanse and Eli Lilly's

Strattera. Global sales of ADHD drugs were around $4 billion dollars in 2009, according to pharmaceutical analysts at Deutsche Bank in London.

NO DIAGNOSTIC TEST IN SIGHT

Thapar said the findings would help unravel ADHD's biological basis, "and that's going to be really important in the future to develop new and much more effective treatments."

But experts stressed that the DNA findings were unlikely to lead the development of a genetic test for ADHD, since a complex mix of genes and environment are likely to be the cause.

"It is not clear that this will yet lead to a diagnostic test, but may well open up new avenues for understanding the neurobiology of the disorder," said Philip Asherson of the Institute of Psychiatry King's College London.

The study also showed an overlap between the deleted or duplicated DNA segments, known as copy number variants (CNVs), and genetic variants linked to the brain disorders autism and schizophrenia -- providing what the scientists said was "strong evidence" that ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition.

The Cardiff team analyzed the genomes of 366 children with ADHD and compared them with 1,047 samples from children without ADHD to try to find variations in their genetic make-up.

Tentacles, death rays and tractor beams: New Skyline trailer is ridiculously awesome

2010-09-29T19:18:00.001-07:00

This just looks crazy...

Tentacles, death rays and tractor beams: New Skyline trailer is ridiculously awesome: ""

(Via .)

Some More Simple Thoughts on Categories of Interest...

2010-09-26T17:34:00.000-07:00

Continuing to think about this, here are some additional thoughts...

There is a great quote on twitter today, as quoted by Mathew Ingram:
Dan Lyons says instead of doing something useful or hard, too many startups are making social widgets and games: http://bit.ly/aQ26TG

Ok, so that is good guidance on how to bucket these ideas, and helps to add to few more.

Useful
The issue with this category is that it is possible to do something useful that really has negligible impact. Things in the hard category are more appealing becuase they seem less prone to this. however, there is only so much time in the day, and hard can be also overwhelming. We do what we can with the time and resources afforded to us...

Metadata-based augmented reality apps

so we have apps based on star ephemerides, on FAA flight records, on shipping records.
I wonder what other publicly available metadata is available on which to base an app.
Licence plates is obvious, public infrastructure like sewers, perhaps? Land records? Deserves to be looked into...
remote vehicles

there are even ipod -app piloted remote vehicles in the latest william gibson book. He's a real zeitgeist guy. How did he know chris andersen from wired was going to do a startup for those? These are going to be BIG some christmas soon, counted on one hand, many fingers left over.
video upload for normal people

came up again last week. really needed.

Hard

I prefer this category: it is the province of dreamers and I am one. Sionne will wonder where the space elevator went; it is in this category, just hiding behind the markup...

Micro-cost tech for emerging markets
This is a thing that keeps coming up right now.
the general idea is that emerging markets need affordable tech to meet basic needs:
cheap filters for clean water, low/no cost solar panels and leds for lighting, smokeless heating elements for cooking, and so on...

Makers, an emerging category that has avoided the negative connotations the hackers seemed to breed into their label, are all over this.

The benefits of this to the planet are potentially huge, the market and economic upside potentially pretty good too, if you do something that you can scale. the keys are usefulness, micro fabrication and distribution costs, and sufficient quality to avoid being perceived as junk.
Start a Stephensonian math or concent

Read Anathem http://amzn.to/cKC9uw, or this explanation taken from it: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Concent

If the thought of starting one of these appeals to you, it does to me too. Find me in the comments. We'll talk.

Social Widgets and Games

I'm so not interested in this category...

Voice apps (powered by Twilio, of course)

I don't live in the right part of the continent, so working at twilio is out of the question, even if they would have me, which is far far far from certain. but I love them. Last year I wrote a twilio-powered twitter / facebook to voice prototype. <-- why it's in this category...Maybe its time to update that and re-look at the economics... bonus round: I could rewrite the OSD in HTML5!

ME/CFS and XMRV: A Picture of Health

2010-09-26T14:56:00.000-07:00

I just found this incredibly good blog called ME/CFS and XMRV. It is a news site about XMRV research, far better than anything I could have hoped to do. Emma-Kate, who writes it, and is on twitter as @cfsandxmrv, is an occupational therapist from New Zealand who carefully annotates every entry with citations and links.

It is just very very good. Here is a preview:

ME/CFS and XMRV: A Picture of Health: "The purpose of this entry is to provide some microscopy images and diagrams generally of retroviruses, and more specifically of the XMRV ..."

Pictures like this:

Some simple thoughts around categories of interest...

2010-09-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

Very occasionally these days I think about writing another personal strategic plan and trying to identify categories of interest, areas where I will focus attention in the hopes of gaining some understanding of things I am curious about, and perhaps even levering that understanding into a business opportunity.

Since I have business-travel-inertial-insomnia tonight, I thought I might jot a few things down that might leak into that future and so far mythical document.

Metadata-based augmented reality apps

so we have apps based on star ephemerides, on FAA flight records, on shipping records.
I wonder what other publicly available metadata is available on which to base an app.
Licence plates is obvious, public infrastructure like sewers, perhaps? Land records? Deserves to be looked into...
Voice apps (powered by Twilio, of course)

I don't live in the right part of the continent, so working at twilio is out of the question, even if they would have me, which is far far far from certain. but I love them. Last year I wrote a twilio-powered twitter / facebook to voice prototype. Maybe its time to update that adn re-look at the economics... bonus round: I could rewrite the OSD in HTML5!
is there a way to make money off the coming "CFS/Autism is caused by XMRV" realization?

I wonder how money got made off of H.Pylori ? Is this thought even ethical?
remote vehicles

there are even ipod -app piloted remote vehicles in the latest william gibson book. He's a real zeitgeist guy. How did he know chris andersen from wired was going to do a startup for those? These are going to be BIG some christmas soon, counted on one hand, many fingers left over.
video upload for normal people

came up again last week. really needed.
really late... must sleep soon...

more later...

The Question of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, XMRV, and Autism

2010-09-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

There was a time last year when I was actively blogging on XMRV and it's possible link to Autism. Then I got a job and my ability to blog went way down as my rate of acquisition of frequent flyer points went way way way up.

That doesn't mean, however, that I am not paying attention to what is going on in this part of the world, and it certainly does not mean that I am not a believer. To be clear, I respect the science and the process, but my gut tells me this is a significant and important topic that deserves focus and attention on a sustained basis from the brightest minds we can bring to bear on the topic.

Based on this very good summary of the state of the art on knowledge around XMRV, published by Kent Heckenlively, Legal Editor of Age of Autism, it appears more and more very influential and very smart people are starting to agree.

Here is an excerpt, from http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/09/my-wife-my-daughter-and-xmrv.html:

The truly insidious thing about XMRV is that it’s a retrovirus. It has two copies of an RNA genome that is reverse transcribed into DNA and inserted into the DNA of the host. Thus it persists a lifetime in an infected individual and multiples itself whenever the cell divides (and only in a dividing cell). The other two known human retroviruses include the HIV virus which causes AIDS and human T lymphotropic virus (HTLV) which causes adult T cell leukemia and a neuro-immune illness called HLTV-1 associated myleopathy, which if left untreated can leave patients wheel-chair bound. XMRV is thus the third known human retrovirus family.

XMRV may be linked to autism as it has been shown to integrate preferentially at the start site of genes and in CpG islands. This could explain a number of the methylation patterns changes seen in autism. Also, retroviruses tend to affect mitochondrial function through the production of reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen species, thus explaining what seems to be acquired mitochondrial defects in some children with autism. The virus buds from the cellular membrane, disrupting the membrane fatty acids and cholesterol and supports the finding of some medical practitioners of a disruption in the cellular membrane of children with autism.

The published findings from the National Institute of Health, Harvard University, and the Food and Drug Administration however showed even higher levels of infection from MRVs in chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers than the original study from Dr. Mikovits, et al, as well as its prevalence in the general population.

In the midst of her work with chronic fatigue patients Dr. Mikovits became aware that several of the children of these patients had autism. Understanding that the virus could be passed down from mother to child Dr. Mikovits tested a small number of these children and found that 40% of these children tested positive. In a statement from the Nevada Commission on Autism Spectrum Disorders, more testing is underway which “could dramatically increase that 40% positive finding.”

A poster presentation by the WPI was made at the 1st International Workshop on XMRV and entitled “Detection of Infectious XMRV in Peripheral Blood of Children” looked at a possible cross-over between parents with XMRV infection and chronic fatigue and whether their children may have the same infection and if so, the neuro-immune disorders from which they may suffer.

The background section stated, “XMRV is a new human retroviral infection of as yet unknown pathogenic potential. Recent reports have found XMRV infection in 3% of healthy adult populations and high percentages in populations of immune compromised individuals and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). The presence of XMRV infection has not been explored in families with CFS or children. An understanding of the XMRV infection rate in children may be particularly helpful given that 1 in 100 children in the US are diagnosed with neuroimmune disorders, including Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and that CFS and childhood neuroimmune disorders share common clinical features including immune dysregulation, increased expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, and chronic active microbial infections. Thus, we hypothesized that XMRV infection may be detected not only in families with CFS but also in children with other neuroimmune disorders.”

According to the methods section, “66 Subjects participated as family members of a parent or child diagnosed with a neuroimmune disorder.” The testing was done with 37 parents and 29 children. 17 of the children were diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, a pair of three-year-old twins had Niemann Pick type C, a neurodegenerative disease, and 10 were healthy siblings.

In the results section of the poster they found, “PCR products of env and gag confirmed XMRV. The age range of the infected children was 2-18. 17 of the children (including the identical twins) were positive for XMRV (58%) and 20 of the 37 parents (54%) were positive for XMRV. 14 of the 17 autistic children were positive for XMRV (82%). Of the 17 families, only one had all members of the family test negative for XMRV. In contrast, 16 of the families with neuroimmune disease, 9 families had at least 1 parent and child test positive for XMRV. 4 of the families had a parent test negative with a positive child, and 2 families had a parent test positive with the diseased child testing negative.”

What jumped out at me from the poster was that 14 out of 17 of the children with autism were positive for XMRV, an infection rate of 82%.

That’s approaching the infection rate of people with chronic fatigue syndrome/ME. Expression of a retrovirus like XMRV might also cause an immune deficiency similar to what’s seen in HIV/AIDS, rendering the immune system incapable of controlling infections like lyme disease, HHV-6, or CMV.

At a recent retroviral conference in San Francisco in February of this year there was a good deal of discussion from Emory University researchers about how XMRV is able to infect cells. While it's known that XMRV can infect cells called fibroblasts in the prostate, the epithelial cells also expressed a large number of antigens suggesting they're similarly infected. The epithelial cells are smooth muscle cells which line the interior of blood vessels, telling them to open up or constrict. The researchers at the conference theorized these blood vessel infections might cause many of the brain and other abnormalities observed in chronic fatigue syndrome.

Abnormalities in blood flow in the brains of children with autism have also been observed and discussed for many years.

YouTube - SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO : Star Blazers the Movie 2010 Trailer 1

2010-09-19T14:51:00.001-07:00

I don't care what anyone says. This was the first anime series I saw as a child, and the first appointment television I can remember. I'm thrilled to see a live action version coming out and can't wait to see it.

YouTube - SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO: Star Blazers the Movie 2010 Trailer 1: ""

Via io9.com

Summer is not over yet...

2010-09-03T19:33:00.001-07:00

Summer is not over yet..., originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

Earlier this week, this is what I got when I turned on the car at work to go home.

Might just be me but I find these much impressive in degrees F.

Also notice that a couple of years ago this sort of thing really killed me, and now I hardly notice it it all.

For the hard core trivial pursuit fan, this was taken outside Philly and the station on the radio is NPR affiliate WHYY...

Holly on the Occassion of her Fourth Birthday

2010-09-03T19:26:00.001-07:00

Holly on the Occassion of her Fourth Birthday, originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

Last Month already, and just getting around to posting this. She is all of 4 now, but still as always going on 10,000. Such a beautiful old soul that came to us...

Lake George, NY

2010-09-03T19:24:00.001-07:00

Lake George, NY, originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

Upper NY State, from a small boat on which we had a tremendous amount of fun

Megan and Chaza

2010-09-03T19:23:00.001-07:00

Megan and Chaza, originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

We visited Chaza in Toronto while we were there....

Former Minister of Finance suggests aggressive autistic teen should be arrested in order to get treatment.

2010-08-28T14:39:00.001-07:00

yet another Autism outrage cycle in Ontario.

The Facebook group is here.

My comment to the group was:

It seems Greg is as ignorant of Pennsylvania as he is of the needs of Autistic children. If you are speaking to Mr. Sorbara again, please extend to him on my behalf an invitation to visit my daughter, in Pennsylvania, where he can see what real caring for the disabled, less than perfect tho...ught it still may be, looks like.

That invitation is extended to anyone here who would like to know more about what, in Ontario, they are NOT getting in the way of reasonable and humane support.

As a start, links:

the article I wrote for the Toronto Star about our experience of moving to Pennsylvania and what it meant for our daughter:
http://soaringhorse.blogspot.com/2009/10/us-can-teach-us-how-to-care-for.html

the blog post I wrote about our first encounter with the Pennsylvania school system:
http://soaringhorse.blogspot.com/2009/09/megan-classrooms-at-simmons-elementary.html

From this distance it is hard to provide much in the way of support, other than as a voice of experience regarding what IS possible when the political will is present. I am not actually to blameful of Mr. Sorbara: he is trapped, as are you all, inside a Canadian system which is nominally universal but factually inadequate in meeting the actual needs of Canadians. The sad part is that he seems to have accepted that, rather than decided to work to chanqe it for the better.

Facebook (7) | Former Minister of Finance suggests aggressive autistic teen should be arrested in order to get treatment.: "Former Minister of Finance suggests aggressive autistic teen should be arrested in order to get treatment.
by Laura Kirby-McIntosh on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 7:14pm

Today I attending a meeting Greg Sorbara, MPP for Vaughan-King-Aurora and the former provincial Minister of Finance. I was there to advocate for my good friend Susan Vanderberg-Pearce, who has two sons with autism. One of her two sons has become increasingly violent over the last few months and Susan is now in a place where she risks her own personal safety every time she is alone with him. He attacks her repeatedly, and has caused her numerous injuries. Susan is an incredibly intelligent, articulate and passionate advocate and helped us create the Ontario Autism Coalition back in 2005. She has tried everything she can to access appropriate supports in the home for her son and was turning to her MPP in desperation for help.

Susan told her story, through tears, and showed gut-wrenching photos of her bruises and the blood-spattered floor of her son's 'calm room.' Sorbara sat emotionless and waited for her to finish. As he prepared to speak, I thought surely he would start by saying something sympathetic. Instead, what he said was the most offensive, outrageous thing I've ever heard.

He started with, 'Are there times when you call the police? What do they do?' Susan told him of course she's called. Then he asked, 'So why hasn't he been charged?'

I think I managed to say something about how obviously he would be found NCR (not criminally responsible) because of his disability, but Sorbara brushed me off.

He said that having K. charged 'might be a way to get him into treatment, because in juvenile court there is the capacity to order the kind of treatment that he needs.' I just about fell out of my chair. I asked him if he was seriously suggesting that K should be criminalized for his disability. I told him that it was bad enough that many parents were still being forced to give up custody of their disabled children in order to get services, but that if he was suggesting that the only other option was to send them into the criminal justice system, then the government had better get ready to build a whole lot of new jails. I asked whether that was really the best that parents of children with autism could expect in 2010 in Dalton McGuinty's Ontario. I wondered aloud if he would like it if the media ran a story about how he suggested to a desperate mother of an autistic child that the best solution to her problem was to have her son arrested.

He said, 'Well, let's be realistic. I can't just wave a wand and create additional capacity. I can't make a new facility appear. I'm just a politician. All I can do is raise these issues in the legislature.' I pounced and asked, 'So will you?' He looked irritated with me by this point. So I shot him a dirty look right back.

I then told him about how long the OAC has been advocating for better services for our kids, and I gave him a copy of the Recommendations report that we presented to staffers in the office of the Minister of Children and Youth back in June. (you can see it on the OAC website, www.ontarioautismcoalition.com) I also pointed out to him that other jurisdictions are doing much more and gave him info about the new changes to the funding formula in BC. I then gave him a copy of the report prepared for the federal government in 2006 comparing autism programs in all the different provincial jurisdictions. I talked a bit about services available in the US. I spoke about how our friend Malcolm is receiving incredible services for his daughter now that he's moved to Pennsylvania and how despite how much we gloat about our health care system in Canada, many kids with autism are doing much better in the US than they are here. I also told him that the OAC is beyond frustrated with how long it's taking for this government to make substantial progress on this issue and that we're giving serious thought to having the main message at our next press conference be, 'If your child just received a diagnosis of autism, get out of Ontario.' He didn't look impressed. (I so don't care.)

I pointed out to him that the Special Services at Home program hasn't had a funding increase in several years and how there are thousands of people on their waitlist, let alone the IBI waitlist. I talked about how the special education funding formula is fundamentally flawed and how it's not about spending massive amounts of new money, but about re-distributing the money that's already in the system more intelligently. I mentioned the concept of individualized funding, and asked whatever happened to the Individualized Funding Agreements that used to be allowed for families. I talked about silos and agencies that jealously guard their budgets instead of helping our kids. His assistant took plenty of notes, but Sorbara offered no ideas. He even claimed at one point to know 'nothing' about how autism funding works in Ontario. I bit my tongue, but somehow managed to offer to return to give him a briefing on that if he'd like.

He then launched into a lecture about how Penn. is on the verge of bankruptcy, the global economy is in rough shape, how governments have limited resources and people don't like it when you try to raise their taxes. He asked how we thought the government should balance all the competing interests. I used Bruce's line about how when times are tough, you look after the most vulnerable first, and that surely as a father, the last thing he would ever cut back was his children.

He said that from a government's perspective, it's all about balancing priorities and that government workers want higher salaries and soon will be threatening to strike if they don't get it. (Made me wonder what would happen if parents of autistic children went on strike...but I digress.)

Susan and her husband Ken talked about the few services that they do have in place for their son and how hard they've looked to find what they need. Susan showed him photos of the clump of hair he son pulled out of her head, the six police cruisers that arrived at her home when she called 911 several weeks ago, and the gut-wrenching note she wrote last night as she tried to simply drive her son home from camp without completely losing control. She asked Sorbara point blank if he really thought that her best option was to send her son into the criminal justice system, where he would share space with deviant adolescents. She pointed out that her son was non-verbal and couldn't speak up for himself, and challenged Sorbara to say whether that's something he would have done to the autistic foster child he once had.

Sorbara said that a lot of the kids in the juvenile system are 'just like' Susan's son. (!) They have emotional, behavioural and psychological problems and they just happened to be born with something not quite wired up properly in their brain. I sat in stunned silence as I listed to the former Minister of Finance make a comparison between young offenders and a 14 boy with severe autism.

Sorbara's point seemed to be that it would be very nice if a judge were to issue a court order forcing a facility to open up a space for K, and that only judges can make those orders. I said to him 'You can't be unaware that families of children with autism have turned to the courts several times for help. Deskin-Wynberg? Ceretti? Sagharian? The courts have consistently refused to tell governments how to spend their money. In fact, your government spent several million dollars fighting our families in court just to prove that jurisdictional point. And now you're suggesting that we trust our children to that same system?' I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

He didn't offer to call any agencies on Susan's behalf. He didn't say he would talk to the Minister of Children and Youth. He didn't offer to write a letter for her. He just shrugged and said 'my issue is that you are a person in danger and I have no idea how to safely decrease that risk.' He promised to look at the materials we left him. I know I won't be holding my breath.

We went back and forth several times, but it felt more like we went around in circles. This is the man who sat at the Premier's right-hand from 2004 to 2007. He managed the entire provincial budget. He was the second most powerful man in Ontario.

And his only idea for how to get services for an autistic teen is to have the child arrested.

Holy fuck."

(Via .)

Highly Anticipated Study Second to Link CFS and Retrovirus

2010-08-26T20:59:00.001-07:00

This is the best full length article I could find describing this weeks progress in publication of XMRV-related studies.

You can find additional articles at the New York Times and the WSJ

The best quote this week comes from Anne Whittemore, the parent who started this whole XMRV controversy by funding an entire research team to get to the bottom of CFS. She said:

"We called it XMRV at the time because that was the name that had been used,” she says. As scientists understand more about the broader family — including the P viruses mentioned by Alter –the terminology, too, might eventually change. “The name isn’t as important as the concept that these are retroviruses infecting human beings,” she says.

These are honest and well meaning people who are doing the best they can to follow a confusing trail of evidence to the truth. They deserve all the support for that honest pursuit that we can give them.

Notable is that the lead Government scientist on this is a researcher who made breakthroughs on Hepatitis A and B, another serious disorder which was found to be caused by viral infection.

As we pursue disease over time we see that much is caused by interactions with actors in our environment, which cause us much distress in mary varied forms. It amazes me to think that, having found diseases of the brain, the liver, the stomach, and many others that are virally caused, that there would still be resistance in principle to the idea that conditions like CFS or Autism could be similiarly caused. The process of science requires us to set aside such prejudice and follow the evidence. These researchers appear fortunately capable of meeting that challenge.

Highly Anticipated Study Second to Link CFS and Retrovirus: "August 25, 2010 %u2014 The authors of a new study that found a strong association between chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and a group of mouse retroviruses closely related to XMRV, or xenotropic murine leukemia virus%u2013related virus, offered possible explanations for the varying results among different research laboratories in Europe and the United States.

Published online August 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the first to confirm the results of Lombardi and colleagues from last October (Science. 2009;326:585-589). That group reported finding XMRV in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from 67% of 101 patients with CFS compared with 3.7% of 218 healthy control patients. Four subsequent studies failed to find evidence of XMRV or related viruses in patients with CFS, including a study from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, published online July 1 (Retrovirology. 2010;7:57).

The current study, conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), found a high rate of infection in CFS-affected patients with what the authors called murine leukemia virus (MLV)%u2013related viruses; 86.5% of 37 patients with CFS had MLV-like virus gene sequences in their peripheral blood mononuclear cells vs 6.8% of 44 healthy blood donors, the researchers reported.

Although the scientists did not find XMRV in their patient samples, XMRV is a type of MLV, according to study coauthor Harvey Alter, MD, chief of clinical studies for the NIH Department of Transfusion Medicine.

Their data, Dr. Alter said August 23 during a media briefing held by the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, 'are highly confirmatory' of the findings of the Science study, led by researchers at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, and 2 other institutions.

Results Contrast With Other Studies

'A dilemma is how to reconcile why some labs find this association and others do not,' Dr. Alter said.

Differences in test methods do not appear to explain the disparities between the results from the new study and those of the recent CDC study, Dr. Alter said in an interview with Medscape Medical News.

'We tested some of their [blood] samples and also found them negative,' he said.

In addition, an NIH institute 'determined both laboratories had equivalent sensitivities in their assays,' the lead author of the other study, CDC microbiologist William Switzer, MPH, told Medscape Medical News.

The best method of collecting and testing blood samples for this class of retroviruses is not yet established, according to Dr. Alter. The NIH will convene a panel of experts September 7 to 8 to discuss this issue and others related to XMRV at the 1st International Workshop on XMRV. Some researchers also have linked XMRV to prostate cancer.

Dr. Alter said the most likely reason for the discrepancy in results is patient selection. Diagnosis of CFS is based on a symptom complex, not a specific disease marker. All patients in the NIH-FDA study met the accepted diagnostic criteria for the syndrome, and most blood samples were from the patient population of a single coauthor, who is a CFS expert, he said.

'There may be a geographic difference,' Dr. Alter told Medscape Medical News. 'In the Northeast, CFS may be due to MLV, and in the West, it may be due to XMRV.'

However, he cautioned against interpreting their results as proving causation of CFS. 'We haven't answered that question yet,' Dr. Alter said, adding that the cause could be multifactorial.

It is also possible that the high frequency of MLV-related infections in their cohort with CFS indicates 'an increased susceptibility to viral infections' because of immune dysfunction, rather than a causal role, the authors speculated in their article.

The research team did prove that MLV infection persists. As a follow-up to using frozen blood samples obtained from patients with CFS nearly 15 years ago, the investigators obtained fresh blood samples from 8 of the 32 MLV-positive patients, and 7 again tested positive for the retrovirus. 'It was the same virus, but it had mutated, as a retrovirus does,' Dr. Alter said.

Virus sequences seen in their patient samples were polytropic, not xenotropic, and were more diverse than those reported by the Nevada group, according to Dr. Alter. This variability is characteristic of a retrovirus and boosted the authors' confidence that laboratory contamination was not responsible for their findings, he said during the media briefing.

Indeed, the researchers were 'very thorough' in showing there was no mice contamination, said a coauthor of an accompanying commentary in the Proceedings, Andrew Mason, MBBS, associate professor of medicine at the University of Alberta in Canada. 'Taken together [with the research by Lombardi et al], these are 2 important studies that should not be ignored,' Dr. Mason told Medscape Medical News.

Publication Delayed

Dr. Alter said his team went to extra lengths to rule out the possibility of laboratory contamination, even asking the journal editor to delay publication of their article after it was accepted so they could do more testing. The lay media reported in July that this action drew criticism from the CFS community, who feared suppression of the findings.

The decision came from the US Department of Health and Human Services, Steve Monroe, PhD, of the CDC, told Medscape Medical News. Officials wanted to find out why results of the 2 federal studies differed.

'I appreciate the frustration of the advocate community, but our goal was to ensure we were providing the best and most accurate data. Sending out an incorrect message would be detrimental,' said Dr. Monroe, director of the CDC Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology.

Switzer said he and his coauthors also temporarily held up publication of their paper but ended up changing nothing.

'We felt it was the very best science we could do,' he said.

They were unable to test patients' blood samples from Dr. Alter's group, Switzer said, because those scientists did not have sufficient stored specimens left.

Although the 2 teams could not explain their conflicting results, Dr. Alter said he and his coworkers also feel confident about their data. 'We were able to add information that, I think, made the paper much stronger,' he said regarding their efforts to retest some patients and to address concerns about potential laboratory contamination.

Dr. Alter said, 'I thought all along: It's more important to be right than to be fast.'

Dr. Alter, Dr. Mason, Dr. Monroe, and Mr. Switzer have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. Published online August 23, 2010."

(Via .)

Reed Hastings at NetFlix on Culture and Responsibility....

2010-08-22T18:55:00.001-07:00

Half a million people have already looked at this on Slideshare. Wonder how many will start to act like owners and question why their companies do not operate in a similiar way?

Culture

View more presentations from Reed Hastings.

Tina and Francis First Dance

2010-08-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

Tina and Francis share their first dance while their daughters watch and record it all on an iPhone...

Ferris Wheel

2010-08-08T18:01:00.001-07:00

Video from the big ferris wheel at the northern extent of the beach at Ocean City, New Jersey, August 8, 2010.

Dr. Ivar Lovaas, a Friend to Autism Children, Has Died.

2010-08-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

This Airplane Luxury Suite Is Way Out of My Budget

2010-07-31T16:42:00.001-07:00

In the comments on this Gizmodo article, I see the light. It burns! points out:

"According to the news, by 2014, $15,000 would buy me a ticket on a sub-orbital flight. I'll take one of those instead."

That reminded me of nothing more than the rapid growth of the cruise ships of the North Atlantic, around the time of Titanic, just before airplanes started destroying the entire industry.

It was a great comment because it reminds us that this linear growth in the size and luxury of these airliners cannot last, that great disasters are sure to strike them as the concentration of risk increases apace with their size, and that it is only a matter of time before some external disruption forces them into obsolescence.

This Airplane Luxury Suite Is Way Out of My Budget:

This is the most luxurious airplane "seat" money can buy: The Singapore Suite, on board Singapore Air's A380s. Fully isolated from the airplane, it has real bed and a three-feet-wide armchair, along with a multimedia center with integrated 23-inch TV

Head of McMichael gallery resigns - thestar.com

2010-07-31T12:51:00.001-07:00

One of my good friends that I just never see enough of is Tom Smart. I met him when he was at the Beaverbrook in Fredericton, have seen him periodically ever since, and enjoyed his company immensely when he moved to Toronto to take on his assignment at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Seems that time is over and he has moved on again. I'm waiting anxiously to see where he will end up next; I'm sure his phone is ringing off the hook already.

Tom has written a number of books that you can find here... You should check them out.

Head of McMichael gallery resigns - thestar.com:

One of Canada’s most controversy-plagued galleries was dealt a blow Friday when its well-regarded chief executive officer and executive director resigned, abruptly ending a four-year tenure marked by relative calm for the institution.

Thomas Smart announced his resignation from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg to staff Friday morning, saying he was proud of what he had accomplished there since his appointment in 2006.

“Tom had a tremendous impact here, in terms of curatorial, infrastructure and financial,” said Upkar Arora, the chair of the McMichael Board of Trustees. “We ran a balanced budget, or even surpluses, every year he was here.”

In the five years leading up to last summer, which included the first three years of Smart’s tenure, McMichael memberships were up 66 per cent. The gallery chief made just under $160,000 in 2009.

When asked if Smart was in fact removed due to tensions between he and the board, Arora replied, “Absolutely not.”

The museum, which in the past was best known for historical Canadian art best exemplified by its collection of Group of Seven landscapes, had under Smart's tenure begun to engage contemporary issues in a way that was previously taboo at the gallery.

The timing of his departure, with the McMichael was preparing to set to stage “Defiant Spirits” in September, a provocative, contrarian exhibition about Canadian painting icons the Group of Seven that would seem to define his tenure there, seems particularly strange.

Some suggested Friday that high-level friction at the McMichael's board brought on Smart's sudden departure. Smart's progressive take on the McMichael's fusty mandate may not have sat well with some long-time patrons and board members.

His abrupt departure was jarring for those who had worked with him. “I'm shocked,” said Diana Thorneycroft, the Winnipeg artist whose exhibition of photographs last year, which gently mocked the Group of Seven, was perhaps the most provocative show of Smart's tenure.

“(The McMichael) had lagged behind for so many years,” she said. “Tom was the first one who was able to say ‘That’s the past — we’re moving forward.’”

When Smart took office in 2006, he inherited an institution beleaguered by decades of battles between Robert and Signe McMichael, who had donated their Kleinburg estate and 179 artworks to the Ontario government in 1965, and the province, who administered it as a museum.

The McMichaels, ardent supporters of the Group of Seven, which included such painters as Tom Thomson and Lawren Harris, were adamant that the McMichael collection grow under the province’s guidance in a way that adhered to the spirit of their original donation. That donation included many works by the Group of Seven, which most often depicted rough wilderness scenes of the Canadian landscape. The McMichaels offered it on the condition that the collection should only grow in a way that reflected the “general character” of their original gift.

However, as the collection grew to include many significant pieces by an array of modern and contemporary artists, Robert McMichael grew increasingly agitated. In 1996, with the collection approaching nearly 6,000 works, he sued the province over what he argued was a violation of their original terms.

In 2001, McMichael appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada to take on the suit, but they refused to hear it, effectively ending his legal challenge. Nonetheless, Ontario’s Conservative government under Mike Harris gave McMichael control of the collection in 2001, creating the position of board designate, allowing him to enforce his mandate. He immediately announced plans to sell almost 3,000 works in the collection, effectively freezing exhibitions and hurting attendance badly.

Robert McMichael died in 2003, but Signe continued on in that role. When Signe died in 2007, Smart began plans to broaden the gallery’s mission. Last summer, three years into his tenure, he was able to stage “Challenging Traditions,” a show of contemporary First Nations’ art that was the first the gallery had built on its own in more than a decade. The show also travelled to Lausanne, Switzerland, marking the first time a McMichael exhibition had ever travelled abroad.

At the time, Smart told the Star that “Challenging Traditions” was “the final nail in the coffin” of the McMichael’s fractious history. Later that summer came Thorneycroft’s show, likely the signature exhibition of Smart’s tenure.

Using famous Group of Seven paintings as backdrops, Thorneycroft would stage darkly comic scenarios using plastic toys, such as a scene of Thomson floating face down in a lake, his signature paintings of jack pine behind him.

“Just the fact he showed my work was remarkable,” Thorneycroft said. “That showed a huge shift in the gallery’s direction. It sent a signal that the McMichael was aware of contemporary issues, and were willing to join the conversation.”

Arora said that Smart’s contribution to the gallery’s programming will be missed. “The strength, curatorially, was not there before Tom arrived,” he said. Smart’s vision for the gallery will be preserved after his departure. “What you’ll see is a continuation of the trajectory Tom started here,” he said.

“We’ll continue to have a balance of the historical work that Canadians know and love, and provocative contemporary shows that will keep us relevant.”

Interim CEO Peter Ross, the gallery’s head of development marketing, will take on Smart’s role on an interim basis when he departs in September.

Smart could not be reached for comment.

Concept Document: S3MA4 (Semaphore)

2010-07-27T18:26:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about autonomous vehicles lately, and how they would operate in the real world.

It seems to me that realistically they need the ability to communicate to each other and to stations they may encounter, and that these communications need to be reliable and low technology in nature. That implies, to me, some sort of visual signalling paradigm.

Visual signalling is hard as it implies embedded devices that can see and interpret information that is encoded in a commonly understood way and that follows a well known syntax and grammar.

For inspiration to solve this challenge conceptually I drew upon several different sources. For visual encoding I wads inspired by the increasing popularity of QR Codes on Mobile Phones. There is no better example of a created syntax and grammar than the verb syntax of Twilio.

Semaphore::

Semaphore:

View more presentations from amstanley.

Implementing this on a simple basis would be relatively straightforward. You could use an embedded system like CMU Cam and code into it the QR Code reading and analysis. Display could be a simple array of IR LEDs, allowing for communications to occur while maintaining light security. Communications could be encrypted using Public Key Schemes to defeat casual eavesdropping.

I'm looking for feedback on whether this concept has sufficient legs to go to prototype. Specifically, I wonder if my assumption that visual signalling is required is valid, and if there is a market for it in military or civilian uses. Leave me a note and let me know what you think.

"Jane Austen's Fight Club"

2010-07-25T18:53:00.001-07:00

the video, 'nuff said...

Malcolm in 1984

2010-07-18T16:10:00.001-07:00

Malcolm in 1984, originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

Just talking via email with Dario Manti, the House leader for Katimiavik when I was in Medicine Hat in 1984.

That was like 25 years ago now. A long time. Every 10 years or so we find each other and say hi. This time around he sent me this...

Bill's Power Generation

2010-07-17T18:48:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine is now generating solar energy onto the grid from his house in Ontario. This is his web page.

Bill's Power Generation: "The Feed-In Tariff program, administered by the Ontario Power Authority, was set up to encourage the installation of sustainable generation for Ontario. The microFIT program is designed for homeowners who install systems of up to 10kW. BPG qualified and signed onto a 20-year microFIT solar photovoltaic (PV) contract, which guarantees a selling price of 80.2 cents/kWh generated.

Arise Technologies, of Waterloo, Canada, was commissioned to design and install the PV system. BPG is comprised of two sub-systems, a 5.04 kW fixed-ground and a 5.04 kW fixed-roof mounted arrays. Each array is comprised of 24 Arise 010AR210WF1 panels at 210W. Each sub-system is managed by a Solectria PVI 5300 inverter, with data collection through RS-232 serial to Cachelan Kyoto 135 Gateway/Loggers, which feed data to Cachelan's SolarVu web portal via the Internet in 10-minute intervals."

Starbucks free WiFi reminds me of better days...

2010-07-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

Days when I was younger, unemployed, and working on shit that was going to change the world.

I have often ranted that Starbucks is not about coffee, it is about who you are being while you drink it. In the beginning we were all being fantastic people who were going to change the world for the better. Before the crash, after boom. Not this crash, no, not the last boom. One a long time before that...

Anyway, today I went to Starbucks. I bought a chai. I actually sat down, with my laptop, for the first time in a long time. I went in to Rally, and entered a bunch of epics for the dev team where I work. It's not a startup, but who cares. It pays, and they do Agile, and you know what? If Starbucks had not launched free WiFi this month, I would not have done that. The paywall would have driven me elsewhere. I would never have felt that twinge of nostalgia, had those memories of startups so long ago. Instead I looked around, at the one or two others sitting there doing pretty much exactly what I was doing.

When the store closed, and they kicked us out, we went out into the hot and humid night. We were all smiling. We were all...back.

Opportunity to Comment on IACC Strategic Plan

2010-07-14T21:32:00.001-07:00

via leftbrainrightbrain:

"Reminder: IACC 2010 RFI to Inform the 2011 Update of the IACC Strategic Plan is Open Until Friday, July 30, 2010

In June 2010 the IACC issued a formal Request for Information (RFI) to solicit public input to inform the 2011 update of the IACC Strategic Plan for Autism Spectrum Disorder Research. During the six-week public comment period (June 18 %u2013 July 30, 2010), members of the public are asked to provide input to the committee on what has been learned in the past year about the issues covered in each of the seven chapters of the IACC Strategic Plan, and on what are the remaining gaps in the subject area covered by each chapter. In addition, the committee is seeking input on the introductory chapter and other general comments about the Strategic Plan. Comments collected through this RFI will be posted to the IACC web site after the closing date.

If you would like to respond to the RFI, please go to: http://www.acclaroresearch.com/oarc/2010rfi/. Responses will be accepted until Friday, July 30, 2010."

Geek Bumper Stickers

2010-07-14T21:27:00.001-07:00

Copy Amazon on a blog post about how you use AWS and get a pack of great geek bumper stickers.

Wrong Planet - Books

2010-07-11T17:26:00.001-07:00

Wrong Planet is a web site for people with Autism and Apsergers. The discussion forums are filled with subjects like "Why do people go to the movies in groups?" and "How do you respond to someone burping in your ear?".

They also have a book page:

Wrong Planet - Books which is a pretty good listing of things to read if you are on the spectrum or are confused by someone who is. One was written by a 10 year old. This is a website of our tribe.

Moms with Apps

2010-07-10T20:50:00.001-07:00

A group of parents who create mobile apps for children, including kids with special needs. You can read more about them here.

Of course, they have a video:

Footprints - Community

2010-07-06T18:34:00.000-07:00

The McMichael Canadian Art Collection has put this fascinating web site about the Group of Seven and how a couple of people went around in Killarney Park and found the actual locations where many of their paintings came from.

In the whole spirit of the thing, people are invited to upload pics, paintings, and trip reports, and form a community of wilderness adventurers. The Group of Seven makes a whole lot more sense once you've been there, any Canadian can tell you that, so this whole site makes sense on some primal level.What it needs, more than anything, is a bit of a nudge in terms of people visiting and contributing. You can help with this, so pass this link on and let you friends know to look at it.

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto

2010-07-05T11:11:00.001-07:00

Timeline of Nuclear Blasts 1945 - 1998, showing location and intensity. The late 50's are pretty scary.

"2053" - This is the number of nuclear explosions conducted in various parts of the globe, excluding recent tests by North Korea...

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto: CTBTO Preparatory Commission:

W00t! - We Got Acquired By Amazon

2010-06-30T20:26:00.001-07:00

Woot got acquired by Amazon.
Of course, they announced it via YouTube, in the usual W00t style:

Blast from the Past: Visiting WebTV during the Boom

2010-06-26T16:18:00.001-07:00

Visiting WebTV, originally uploaded by Soaring Horse.

Malcolm Stanley, Alan Hutchinson, David Bennett, From Rogers, at Microsoft Sunnyvale, during the boom...

Recipe for Disease: A Gene and a Virus - ScienceNOW

2010-06-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

Think XMRV and Autism and read this carefully.
Notice any similiarities in the disease model described?
Thought you might...

Recipe for Disease: A Gene and a Virus - ScienceNOW

Many of us carry genes for diseases that we'll never get. Take Crohn's disease, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the digestive system: Well over half the population harbors at least one genetic variant linked to Crohn's, but just a fraction of them currently have it. Scientists have known for a long time that environmental triggers help explain this discrepancy, but they don't know exactly how. Now, a chance discovery in mice shows that when animals with a particular Crohn's gene are exposed to a specific virus, they develop features similar to those in people with the disease—the first time scientists have noted that genes and environment have intersected in this way in Crohn's. Scientists hope that the finding is just the beginning of many that will show how genes and environment combine in specific ways to produce all sorts of chronic diseases.

The finding was a lucky break. Immunologist Thaddeus Stappenbeck and virologist Herbert Virgin of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis were moving their mouse colony to a superclean facility to keep the animals free of viruses that often afflict lab mice. The duo and colleagues had been working with mice who carried a gene called ATG16L1, which raises the risk of Crohn's disease in people. When the mice were moved, they no longer showed abnormalities in their intestinal cells. "There has to be an environmental trigger present in one facility but not the other," Virgin says he thought at the time.

The researchers immediately homed in on a suspect: a virus that Virgin had discovered and reported in Nature 7 years ago called murine norovirus. Noroviruses are common in people, too, for whom they cause gastrointestinal upset. One of the most famous is the Norwalk virus, which commonly sickens people in close quarters, such as on cruise ships. For years, gastroenterologists have noticed that patients coming to them with newly diagnosed Crohn's disease had often suffered some sort of stomach virus recently.

To test whether murine norovirus, which wasn't present in the "clean" facility, could explain the difference in their mice, the researchers infected the ATG16L1 mice with a particular strain of murine norovirus, called MNV CR6. After 7 days, inflammation showed up in a type of intestinal cell called Paneth cells—the same abnormalities the mice had carried in their earlier, more germ-laden home. The inflammation is very similar to what's seen in patients with Crohn's disease in these same cells. Another strain of norovirus didn't have this effect, and the ATG16L1 mice stayed healthy.

Scientists have long believed that in addition to genetics and viral exposure, Crohn's disease is driven partly by an abnormal balance of bacteria in the gut. Virgin, Stappenbeck, and their colleagues approximated this by taking ATG16L1 mice that had already been exposed to the norovirus—so they were destined to suffer some intestinal problems—and fed them a solution that injures the intestines further. In otherwise healthy mice, the solution induced ulcers, which was expected. In the affected mice, the injection led to even more features that looked like Crohn's, including inflammation through the wall of the colon, the team reports in tomorrow's issue of Cell.

R. Balfour Sartor, a gastroenterologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and chief medical adviser to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America in New York City, says the work could help explain why the majority of people who have genes for Crohn's don't develop the disease. It shows that many factors are necessary to induce Crohn's, he says, but not one is sufficient all on its own.

Still, much work remains to be done to determine how applicable the findings are to people, says Sartor. He'd also like to know whether other viruses, in the presence of ATG16L1, can have the same effect—and whether other Crohn's genes combined with this norovirus do, too.

Stappenbeck says that another big mystery is the mechanism—how exactly this norovirus combines with this particular gene to produce gut abnormalities. He and Virgin also plan to start looking at humans with Crohn's disease to see what viruses they may have been exposed to.