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Sunday, April 29, 2012
I Am the One Who Clicks Banner Ads [Humor]
Study: 95% Of Independent Restaurants Don?t Have Mobile Sites, Only 40% Have Online Menus
Restaurants just love to put Flash intros with auto-playing music and animations on their front pages. If you are trying to look at a one of these sites on your mobile browser without Flash, chances are you can't even get to anything else on the site because far too often, there is no way to bypass the animation and get to the information you want, or because the complete site was designed in flash. It's not just these obnoxious animations that make restaurant websites a hassle, though. According to a new study by Restaurant Science, a restaurant industry information and analytics provider, one out of eight full service restaurant chains and a depressing one out of twenty independent restaurants don't have a mobile website. What makes this even worse is that according to some reports, half of all visits to restaurant websites are from mobile devices.peyton manning broncos mexico city earthquake stand your ground law dancing with the stars season 14 david garrard bethenny frankel miguel cabrera
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Motorola Solutions reports Q1 2012 sales of $2 billion, expects jump in Q2
Motorola Solutions (MSI) -- the less familiar Motorola that makes radios, barcode scanners and such for government and enterprise sectors -- just posted sales of $2 billion for the first quarter of 2012. This is a seven percent boost over Moto's results from the same period last year, and that growth reflects an 11 percent jump in government sales. It wasn't all rosy for Motorola this quarter, though: Profit was down two-thirds to $157 million, and sales to large businesses slipped two percent. MSI (not that MSI) expects second-quarter sales to grow six percent compared to last year's earnings, so it doesn't look like government clients will be dropping those wearable displays any time soon.
Continue reading Motorola Solutions reports Q1 2012 sales of $2 billion, expects jump in Q2
Motorola Solutions reports Q1 2012 sales of $2 billion, expects jump in Q2 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tuesday, April 24, 2012
For entrant in Sikorsky helicopter contest, a lift of faith
Up, up and not quite away.
That's the frustrating story of human-powered helicopters and the prize coveted by virtually everyone who has designed the cumbersome beasts and tried to get them aloft.
So far, nobody has come up with a muscle-driven machine capable of hovering for 1 minute and rising 3 meters ? requirements for the Igor I. Sikorsky Prize, an honor the helicopter industry has dangled before aeronautics buffs for 32 years. The prize has been offered so long that the booty, initially $10,000, became embarrassingly small. Now it's $250,000 and still unclaimed.
Despite the skeptics, Neal Saiki, a 45-year-old Santa Cruz engineer, chases the Sikorsky dream, building unlikely craft that are part bicycle, part super-sized pinwheel.
"We're so interested in bigger and faster, we're so used to going to the moon or looking at stars that are light years away that this goes against the grain," he says. "But it's one of the last aviation frontiers."
The Sikorsky has gnawed at him since 1989, when he led a team at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that built the first muscle-driven chopper to get off the ground. But the 7.1-second flight, which soared all of 8 inches off the floor of a Cal Poly gym, wasn't nearly enough to take home the prize.
Still, it was a heady day. Onlookers cheered as Greg McNeil, a fellow engineering student and bike racer, pedaled furiously. Saiki, grasping a safety rope at the end of a 100-foot rotor, urged him on, twirling his hand over his head and yelling, "Up! Up! Up!" Clad in a white dinner jacket and black bow tie, Saiki looked as if he had sauntered in on his way to the prom. "If you're setting a world's record," he explained in an interview decades later, "you might as well look good."
But Saiki still didn't have the Sikorsky, and it bugged him. After graduating from Cal Poly with a master's degree in aeronautical engineering, he worked for NASA but soon turned entrepreneurial. He invented a hanging cot for climbers and designed high-end mountain bikes ? but the Sikorsky was always churning in his imagination, just out of reach.
For a while, he tried his hand at creating another entry for the Sikorsky sweepstakes. In 1994, five years after the DaVinci III lifted off oh so briefly, his ongoing dream went up in smoke: A forest fire swept through his workshop near San Luis Obispo, destroying the Penguin, another human-powered chopper he'd been building with high hopes.
A trim man with a passion for rock climbing and samurai swords, Saiki sold his house in 2006 to start Zero Motorcycles, a pioneering manufacturer of electric cycles in Santa Cruz. In a management shake-up last year, he left Zero, saying he wanted to spend more time with his four children ages 1 to 11. He also announced ? unsurprisingly, to those who knew him ? that he intended to build a human-powered helicopter.
"I've always wanted to go back and have another try at it," Saiki said. "Now I've got the time, and I don't have the day-to-day financial pressures."
So far, Saiki has spent more than $100,000 to create the craft he calls the Upturn. He works in his garage, has ultra-lightweight parts fabricated all over the country and runs tests at a friend's private hangar, far from prying eyes. This summer, he hopes to make his bid in front of witnesses appointed by the American Helicopter Society International, the prize's sponsor.
"We want to make sure we can win it before we do that,'' Saiki said. "It's a very large, very fragile aircraft and a million things can go wrong."
A human-powered helicopter has no known use. According to conventional scientific wisdom, it would have to weigh less than a couple of checked bags but span a good-sized barn. Some experts doubt that such a craft can fly for a full minute, even with muscle power provided by an elite cyclist.
The fundamental challenge is daunting. Airplanes accelerate gradually, essentially lifting skyward on a ramp of air. Helicopters, however, shoot straight up ? a feat that requires a jolt of energy so big that it is beyond the capability of most in-shape pedalers.
"Humans can only deliver so much," said Matt Tarascio, a helicopter engineer who coordinates the contest and works for its chief funder, Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. "In industry, we'd just put in a bigger engine."
Then there's the problem of weight. To get off the ground, a helicopter must churn an immense volume of air. To do that with the measly power provided by a human, the chopper's rotors must make up for their lack of speed with huge dimensions. But those big rotors ? sometimes longer than the Wright brothers' first flight of 120 feet ? can be exceedingly floppy, and stiffening them adds more weight.
"Just getting off the ground is a significant achievement," Tarascio said.
As time draws closer for Saiki's shot at the prize, he's raising money to remake key parts and shave 15 pounds off his craft. Every few weeks, he trucks it to the hangar in 17 pieces and, with a small crew, takes as long as six hours to assemble it. They grapple with high-tech puzzles of vibration and instability but also contend with low-tech problems, like looping a rope for a safety harness over a girder six stories off the ground. After trying a bow and arrow, Saiki managed it with a fishing rod.
Over the years, there have been about 20 attempts at the Sikorsky. The rules are strict: no batteries, no lighter-than-air gases, no parts jettisoned from midair, no drugs to amp up the pilot, no wind. Ground-based crew members may touch the craft to help keep it stable at takeoff and landing, but not during flight. It must hover over a 10-meter-by-10 meter square, an area roughly the size of eight compact parking spaces.
Besides Cal Poly's DaVinci III, only two of the elaborate gizmos have lifted off. In 1994, students at Nihon University in Japan flew their Yuri I for 19.46 seconds, rising to 8 inches. Last May, the University of Maryland's Gamera, named for the huge, fire-breathing turtle of Japanese monster films, cleared the floor for 11.4 seconds.
In Santa Cruz, Saiki and his crew have run a few test flights at a local high school gym, barely large enough to accommodate the Upturn's two delicate foam rotors. At one point, the 90-pound craft's balsa wood seat flew off its titanium-and-carbon fiber frame like a piece of cheap scenery, dumping Greg McNeil, the bike racer who piloted the DaVinci III 23 years ago.
"It looked like we'd come off the ground, and once that happens there are all these funky loads pulling on the cables," said the 44-year-old McNeil, who could be Saiki's pilot once again. "Any weak points in the craft get stressed."
McNeil said he's just 3 or 4 pounds heavier than the 135 he weighed in college. He and some other Cal Poly pals, all engineers, are assisting Saiki, who is in touch with his former mentor, a now-retired Cal Poly engineering professor named William Patterson.
Patterson, a Vietnam War helicopter pilot who was shot down in Laos, was the driving force behind Cal Poly's entry in the Sikorsky contest.
"My students figured it was something they could build in a couple of days," he said.
It took eight years.
steve.chawkins@latimes.com
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Noah Tsika: Confessions of a Queer Bully
Bullying makes strange bedfellows. Recently, in one of my classes, two students came to blows for being, in the words of one, "different types of gays." The conflict escalated, with the combatants, both men, debating the provenance of gay violence. While "not in my classroom" is the hokey but effective refrain that I usually reserve for such admittedly rare moments, I discovered on this occasion that I was simply too surprised, and too selfishly fascinated, to speak it. Instead, I said to the men, "Tell me more." Another chestnut, and one that I use when eager to encourage students to expand the parameters of class participation, "tell me more" elicited, in this instance, an altogether extraordinary statement: "There's such a thing as a gay bully, and that's what I'm dealing with today, in your class, and I can't take it anymore."
As a college professor whose college days are not distant, I can well remember the inane (and often self-serving) debates that raged between star students, wherein one would assume a familiar stance but hope to transcend it through sheer academic aptitude, to recuperate it through lawyerly precision and completeness, while the other would, to take a phrase that I hated, "play devil's advocate," and shout that Judith Butler was a dumb bitch, and hope to hell that a peer could appreciate the facetiousness of that phrase, the mock indignation of such an utterance.
This time, however, sarcasm seemed but a dream, and the dreaded upshot of in-class debate was not intellectual embarrassment but actual physical violence. When one young man brandished a fist, and the other slid forward on his seat, sleek as a fox, I first felt pride, for these were my kinds of gays, willing to shatter stereotypes with every Clint squint, staring each other down as if strapped to the saddles in an old Spaghetti Western. I then felt fear, for the physical well-being of both men, yes, but also for my job, my beloved but perilously untenured professorship, and for the poor, bewildered students who sat there waiting for me to resume my lecture.
Some of them, however, were smiling. I saw the twinkles in their eyes, the look that said, "Shit, man, these fags are gonna fight." I might have scowled at such faces, I'm not sure. The minutes that followed are a blur, except for the seconds that saw one man, the self-described victim of gay bullying, stand up, slip his naked iPad into a white canvas bag, and saunter out of the room, a Western hero in retreat. A few titters from the back row, some heavy, defeated breathing from the gay bully, and a scalding sound from behind the closed classroom door: the hero in tears.
My own waterworks would soon be loosed, though I kept my emotions in check until safely confined to my office. But why did I cry? Why was I, a professor who took pride in his capacity to extemporize, strangely unable to speak as two students, both self-identified gay men, made the atmosphere in a usually chilly lecture hall hot with dread and discomfort? What, really, had happened in that classroom?
For starters, someone had used the phrase "gay bully." The latter word, with its once-simple associations, has lately been transformed into a communal rallying cry, and one centered on the odiousness of homophobia. But a gay bully, a gay perpetrator of crimes of conscience, is a concept that no one wants to wrestle with, let alone acknowledge. Sure, the survival of angry (or simply cheeky) assessments of anti-gay bullies, the sorts of assessments that say, "He's really gay; that's why he picks on pansies," seems guaranteed in an age of aggressive sexual accusation. But what happens when both bully and victim are openly, vociferously interested in sleeping with members of their own gender? And what if, tracking the very topic of membership, one man says that another is "the wrong kind of gay," and thereby excludes him, excommunicates him from a monolithically queer country? That's far different from calling him simply unsexy, or uncool. It's the sort of move that I myself have made, and it's often a means of defining, and defending, one's fetish for fey twinks, or tough bears, or god knows what kinds of queers. But when does it become a bullying tactic? When does it reduce one man, or two men, to tears?
When I first tried to answer that question, alone in my office, I thought immediately of a moment from my own scholastic past: I was seated, eager and inquisitive, in a classroom at New York University. I was there to complete my Ph.D. in cinema studies, focusing on theories of gender and sexuality as they related to my favorite subgenre of documentary cinema: the American military training film. The class in question was called "Structures of Passing." We read and talked about men and women of color who could yet be considered white, and who often lived as if they were white, to sometimes devastating ends. We considered cinematic characterizations of "lipstick lesbians" whom straight men had the temerity to proposition. Suddenly, apropos of little more than the broad topic of lesbianism, a lanky, beautiful, stylishly dressed young man, a fellow student at the seminar table, said to me, "I might be willing to buy that you're gay if you say that you're a butch lesbian. That's the only way for you to make much sense."
I felt the blood drain from my face. The comment had cut to the heart of my concerns about my own self-presentation, about the fathoms-deep voice that I was desperately trying to lighten, about the fat tummy that wasn't sufficiently protuberant to make me a bear, about the big arms that weren't bulging enough to crown me a muscle queen, and about the emotional sensitivity that cancelled out my masculine physicality. A walking contradiction, I simply couldn't win. Comments such as my classmate's made me feel two inches tall.
Was this an instance of gay bullying? I think so. Today, I can look back on the incident and laugh at the other guy's gumption, all while recognizing that his argument, when viewed from any angle, was asinine; that he was the less-than-elegant loser; that I was his secretly superior victim. This is one of the perks of approaching middle age: you get to laugh at your detractors, or simply ignore the comments designed to cut you.
I couldn't laugh back then. I could only lower my head. Silently, I addressed the gay bully: "You get to be beautiful. You get to be slim and stylish. You get to use your melodious voice to make your classmates purr. Why punish me? Why bully me?"
But I didn't actually utter such statements. Instead, I said, with childish petulance replacing righteous anger, "I'm sorry that I'm not as faggy-fabulous as you, dude. So sue me."
A few of my fellow students laughed, though only, I suppose, at that archaic last line, an embarrassing relic from my mid-'90s youth, the litigious descendant of Pee-wee Herman's "I know you are, but what am I?" They weren't laughing at "faggy-fabulous," the hyphenated phrase that I felt best described my antagonist, and that I had chosen for its sheer naughtiness.
It got some gasps, from students who believed that I'd gone too far, that I'd inflicted pain, not just on my attacker but on everyone else, the gay students especially. Within seconds, someone was calling me a bully, me, the man who'd been attacked, and who was trying, however imperfectly, to fight back. "You sound like a bully," the student said, her blonde hair tied with ironic red ribbons, signifiers of a Swiss Miss innocence that, in this context, signaled the woman's awareness, and disavowal, of her own racial identity. Sexually, she was straight, she'd announced on more than one occasion, and her decision to adjudicate was born of an aversion to my voice. My hormonally appointed, deep speaking voice was villainous to her ears. She said, "It's because you sound straight that you can't say what you said."
I scanned the room for the disgusted looks that, I felt, the comment deserved. I saw only nodding, even beaming countenances, kids who seemed ready to declare their decision to likewise label me a bully. But what had I done? What were my crimes? One could say that I had simply, and shamefully, adopted my attacker's own approach, that I'd duplicated his snobbish refusal to see me as something other than a certain kind of queer. But that wasn't quite the case. Far from a facetious statement, "I'm sorry that I'm not faggy-fabulous" was, coming from me, deeply sincere. I was sorry; I am sorry. I stand on subway platforms flanked by fabulousness, by voguish clothes and clear skin. My desire, never hidden, always written on my face, is prosaic: I want both to be and to love such men. The fact that I infer homosexuality on the basis of their burnished appearance just adds to my self-loathing. I know better: they might be straight, and therefore even further from my experiential realm. But still I stand, with wobbly legs, while competing pinwheels of fear and desire spin in front of my face. I almost faint, every time.
I am not "fabulous." The man who bullied me was not "butch." We could level these accusations against each other, and also, I suspect, against ourselves. But must a qualitative valence always come to color such comments? Must a declaration of gay difference lead to the creation of a hierarchy?
I haven't been able to forget an even earlier incident, one involving two teenagers in a southern Maine middle school. I was one; the other was a rich kid who called me a Kmart gay. Though a marker of hipster chic today, Kmart was in those days, in my own social circles, still suffering from the legacy of Rain Man, the film in which a then-trendsetting Tom Cruise had cried, "Kmart sucks!"
The irony is that I did not buy my clothes at Kmart (though today I do, and passionately). No, I was the son of a hardworking, often struggling, but always elegant woman who made many of my clothes. The problem, for my gay antagonist, was that I wore them poorly. I didn't look good.
To make his point, he grabbed my sweater, a knitted number, numinous in my eyes because my mother had made it, and tore a hole at the shoulder. I punched his face and promptly ended up in the principal's office. Pointing to the tear in my sweater wouldn't suffice as self-defense, I could see immediately. I would have to tell of my terror of a fellow gay kid, of the low grade that he had given me, of the abuse and confusion that I was dealing with. I didn't even like -- I did not want to kiss -- this kid, and that was part of the problem. Wasn't I supposed to want him, this boy who seemed to share my stance on sex?
We had only tentatively, in our limited teen lingo, spoken of being similarly different, of being gay. ("Chris gets a stiffy when he looks at you," said my enemy. "Good," replied I.) But no sooner had those discussions started than they were transformed into something sinister, something evaluative. I was bad and had betrayed my fellow fag. He couldn't relate. I was a Kmart gay.
I tried my best to tell all of this to the counselor assigned to my case. She couldn't help but correct me: "Now, Noah, you know you're not really gay." It was a statement that I'd heard before, from my mother, who'd reminded me that I was neither gay nor straight (since I hadn't hooked up with another person and so couldn't know my "true orientation"), and from my father, who'd suspected me of simply seeking attention.
In claiming that I was straight, most people were, I think, responding not to my reasonably butch appearance (my "manly mannerisms," a classmate had called them) but to my lack of any sort of boyfriend. To this day, I have not had a boyfriend, not really. No date has deigned to meet my parents, and so my parents can't put a face, can't trace a romantic practice, to my rhetoric, to the self-definition that I first delivered 16 years ago. To those who listen to them, my words are empty. I'm all talk.
I often wonder why I pine so prodigiously, or why I stare with a strange mix of disgust and desire at the gorgeous gays who surround me. I live in New York City; models and movie stars are in my midst. It must be that my history of being told that I'm not even gay is making me choke on my own lust, and in the one place where open utterances of same-sex desire seem all too acceptable. I'm fighting not religious bigotry but the blindness of liberals. I often wish that I'd been told that homosexuality is a sin, instead of that I was wrong, that I was somehow fucked-up, in self-defining as gay. I didn't get a very convenient demon.
To downplay the severity of gay bullying is to offer up a fairly familiar form of homophobia. It's to say that "the gays" are largely harmless -- cruelly queeny, sure, but scarcely bullies. Sticks and stones might break one's bones, but bitching is just good fun.
That stance, dependent as it is upon certain stereotypes, is bad enough. But to deny altogether the existence of gay bullying is another matter entirely. It's to betray a belief in the erotic basis of all inter-queer conflicts. Accordingly, if ever we quarrel, it's because we're secretly enamored of one another. This is the infantilizing answer that many a clueless parent has provided, and that mainstream (which is to say straight) romantic comedies have lately investigated. He hates you because he likes you; he hits instead of kisses.
Well, of course he does. He hits because he's a bully, and whatever desires are earnest and incipient in him must be sublimated to a simple recognition of his status as such. Perhaps my scholastic antagonists desired me. I doubt that they did, but I don't much care, in any case, because what matters, all that matters, is that they made me feel small, that their words smarted, that they seemed like bullies.
Anticipating the open declaration of one of my own students, I myself once said, "I'm being bullied, here in school, and it sucks." At the time, I was 14. I couldn't quite articulate the gay basis of the bullying, but I tried to. In so doing, I came out as gay, and was promptly told that I was straight, in what seemed to be the second stage of bullying.
That was well before bullying became such a common topic of conversation, before the endless op-ed pieces about how best to alleviate high school homophobia, before Clementi's suicide and the scores of videos alleging that "It Gets Better." But what, pray tell, is "it"? What's "better"? Those videos, too, seemed bullying; they made me feel such shame that I shivered whenever I watched them. Here were gay and gay-friendly celebrities saying that, as an adult, I would find a community of supportive homosexuals. I haven't found it.
I'm a professor now, a junior professor, struggling to succeed. I'm too old, and, as a professional, too remote, to enter eruptive classroom debates about gay bullying. But I'm not old enough to forget that they once involved me, as both victim and antagonist. "Faggy-fabulous" is a phrase that I once used; a "Kmart gay," the wrong kind of gay, is what I've been called. Gay bullying makes strange bedfellows, and that's because it comes in so many forms.
I met with my student, the victim, the one whose tears had inspired my own, during office hours, ostensibly to discuss his midterm paper. Predictably, he mentioned that he was having a tough time at school, "just in general." I didn't ask him to elaborate. I'm not qualified to offer social advice. Even if I were, to do so would be a perversion of professorial protocol. "The college offers services for those who need them" is a phrase that faculty members are encouraged to furnish.
I found myself saying instead, "I've been there. I had a tough time, too, but you're a terrific writer." I meant it, both the part about relating to the kid's concerns and the acclaim for his talent. As we continued to talk about his coursework, his eyes would light up, and then just as quickly darken. Delight over the promise of my complete understanding would be dampened by my professionally mandated reticence. I could lend a compassionate ear, but I couldn't tell him too much. For me, queer communication comes at a cost.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Services from DSM ...
Summary
Until recently Business Continuity was seen as necessity only for large organisations. It is now widely accepted, no matter the size of the business, it is imperative that has a Business Continuity plan in place in order to survive a disaster situation.
Although seemingly surrounded by jargon the process of Business Continuity is, in fact, very simple and easy to apply. Very minor, scalable and cost effective changes can be made to even the smaller business which will enable it to survive a major incident.
The purpose of this guide is to remove the technical jargon and show how Business Continuity can fit the needs of SME`sThink about the effects on a business if its premises caught fire. What would happen if it were to experience a major utilities failure or extreme weather conditions? For small and medium sized Enterprises (SME`s) which are localised it is even more imperative to have some Business Continuity capability.
In recent years Business Continuity has become the norm in large corporate organisations. Now the same practices are beginning to filter through to smaller business as they begin to see the benefits. The key when implementing a Business Continuity plan, as an SME, is simplicity. No Technical ability is needed and even small changes which are scalable to the company size can mean the difference between disaster and survival.
What is Business Continuity?
The first step in applying a plan to any type of business is understanding what Business Continuity actually is. Put simply without jargon it is an action performed or applied to ensure business function is available during incident or disaster.
Business Continuity takes a number of forms ???
Workplace recovery
If an incident rendered a business premises unusable, to where would it recover its operation? Simple?. to a workplace recovery facility. These are buildings dedicated to providing effective workplace environments to allow continuation of business operations, in emergency situations.
Hosting
Hosting is the process of holding, either whole or in part, your computer systems and software etc. This can be done offsite allowing complete security should your premises or equipment be lost.
IT/Telecoms Backup
Allowing your telecoms and IT solutions to be accessible away from your premises with complete security of your data.
The importance of employees is sometimes missed. The success of any company is determined by the most valuable asset - its people. Identify the risk of your employees and put procedures in place for them to continue work.
The plan then needs to be tested and regularly updated. It helps to make someone responsible for this so assigning the role of Business Continuity Project Manager could be useful.
The importance of employees is sometimes missed. The success of any company is determined by the most valuable asset - its people. Identify the risk of your employees and put procedures in place for them to continue work.
The plan then needs to be tested and regularly updated. It helps to make someone responsible for this so assigning the role of Business Continuity Project Manager could be useful.
Conclusion
Each of the elements mentioned earlier (Workplace recovery, Hosting and IT/Telecoms Backup) cover very specific areas of business. Not all will apply to every business template. Taking the time to review the business model will help decide the best option available. Once a workable, tested business continuity solution is in place it will provide complete peace of mind for the organisastion, employees and customers.
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Roku 2 XD and Roku 2 XS launch today in Canada with over 100 channels
Continue reading Roku 2 XD and Roku 2 XS launch today in Canada with over 100 channels
Roku 2 XD and Roku 2 XS launch today in Canada with over 100 channels originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Target set on cancer gene MCL1
Monday, April 16, 2012
A research team pursuing one of the most commonly altered genes in cancer has laid a critical foundation for understanding this gene that could point the way toward developing drugs against it. A recent study of cancer genetics pointed to the gene MCL1, which encodes a protein that helps keep cells alive. The new research pinpoints compounds that repress MCL1's activity and highlights an important companion gene that predicts if a tumor is dependent upon MCL1 for survival. Together, these tools suggest a path toward new therapeutics directed at MCL1.
"It was not immediately obvious that MCL1 was such an attractive therapeutic target in cancer," said Todd Golub, director of the Broad's Cancer Program and Charles A. Dana Investigator in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Golub is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "But once it became clear that MCL1 was something that we wanted to turn off in tumor cells, we faced two additional problems: we didn't know which tumors depend on it for survival and there wasn't an obvious path to drug discovery. This paper addresses those two challenges."
In a paper appearing in the April issue of the journal Cancer Cell, Golub and colleagues from the Broad Institute and Dana-Farber identify several chemical compounds that tamp down the expression of the MCL1 gene and describe the relationship between MCL1 and a related pro-survival gene, BCL-xL. The research team leveraged several critical Broad Institute resources, including the recently published Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) and RNAi screening capabilities, to better understand how to target MCL1.
MCL1 is frequently amplified in human cancer, meaning that multiple copies of the gene are often present in tumors. The research team suppressed MCL1 in cancer cell lines, allowing them to determine which ones depended on MCL1 for survival. The researchers then looked for a genetic signature that accurately predicted which cell lines were dependent on MCL1 for survival. The gene BCL-xL, another gene protective against cell death, was clearly the best predictor. In its presence, cancer cells can survive even when MCL1 is turned off.
"That was gratifying not only because BCL-xL was a clear winner as a predictive marker, but also because it encodes a protein in the same pathway as MCL1," said Guo Wei, the paper's first author. Wei is a research scientist at the Broad Institute and a research fellow in pediatrics at Dana-Farber. "It's not just right statistically ? it also makes sense given the biology."
Drugs targeting BCL-xL are currently in clinical trials. The new study predicts that in cancer cells where both genes are highly expressed, combination therapies targeting both genes could be effective in treating the tumor.
The researchers also tested almost 3,000 chemical compounds, searching for ones that turned off the expression of MCL1. One of the compounds that this screen revealed was the natural compound triptolide. To find out how triptolide has its effect, the researchers turned to another Broad-created resource: the Connectivity Map, a database researchers can use to connect drugs, genes, and diseases.
"Based on the Connectivity Map, triptolide appears to be a classical inhibitor of transcription, meaning that it should tamp down the expression of all genes," said Wei. "However, it disproportionately affects MCL1. If you give a dose of transcriptional inhibitor, most gene transcripts decrease at a gentle rate, but MCL1 levels decline sharply."
Transcriptional inhibitors like triptolide may be useful tools for probing MCL1 biology, but Golub emphasizes that specific, targeted therapies for MCL1 are also needed. "We used clever chemical genomic approaches to find a way to inhibit MCL1, but the results further our resolve to find more specific MCL1 small molecule inhibitors," Golub, senior author of the study, said.
"The work suggests a path for the clinical development of an MCL1 inhibitor," said Wei. "A number of anti-cancer drugs currently in use have the effect of turning off MCL1 expression. Our study suggests that we're beginning to get a handle on which tumor types might be most responsive to these drugs. And, as newer MCL1-specific drugs are developed, this study suggests the patient population to focus on in clinical trials."
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Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard: http://www.broad.mit.edu
Thanks to Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard for this article.
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Fantastic Techniques For Using A Good Exercise Strategy ...
There are several kinds of regimens to have your system in shape. Listed below are some useful health and fitness suggestions to help you get fit.
Make use of this suggestion, done by several tennis participants to obtain much stronger forearms. Commence buy laying some newspaper on a table or any other flat area. Utilize the hand you write with to crumple the paper with just as much compel as possible muster for 30 just a few seconds. Carry out this training twice. Then, try this once more together with your other hand just once. You may then recurring this 2 times together with the dominant hand once more.
Using your canine for the stroll may be a great way to start exercising. Pooches are nuts for walks and they also have eagerness and stamina that you will discover infectious. Usually do not allow it to be hard. Wander about your community, venturing additional afar as soon as your health and fitness amounts boost. Possess a workout partner is among one of the benefits of getting a pet.
Transform your encounter a few elements. Begin slowly and gradually, working up to your regular tempo. For the past part of your manage, press as challenging as possible and manage quicker than your regular speed. It is possible to enhance your common working stamina and the level of terrain you can deal with with this particular approach.
Enhance working stride pace if you would like participate in a sprint. To get this, you must ensure your foot is often landing beneath your system as opposed to in the front. Make use of toes to push off using your back lower leg to acquire you continuing to move forward. When you will process this, you will see your jogging pace boost.
If you manage it can help you achieve utmost fitness. Running has a huge amount of rewards it burns kilocalories, creates low fat muscle tissue, increases your cardio health and helps your brain. Aerobics improve your brain?s the flow of blood for more healthy mind tissues. There is proof to indicate that jogging could even be as good as antidepressants for many who combat depressive ailments.
Regardless of the fitness plan, stretches is important. Your muscles must be totally and appropriately stretched before and following finishing a workout. In the event you neglect stretching, you can severely injure your limbs. Whenever you stretch your muscles, it warms them up before your training session and relaxes them right after your training session.
Yogurt is a real winner when planning a diet that can help you get in shape. You will find health and fitness benefits from natural yogurt such as aiding food digestion. Yogurt is additionally rich in nutrition such as protein and calcium mineral. Dairy is an extremely crucial staple inside your each day diet regime and has now been proven that people that eat huge amounts are far healthier.
Give some thought to volunteering to get an actual online community service task to help you achieve your fitness goals. Neighborhoods are always in need of those who will help with assorted actual physical things to do that they will enjoy your support carrying out. You will probably do a great deal of shifting all around while providing for those in need.
There are several methods to strategy a match way of life. Once you dig with the stack of thoughts, you?ll locate a couple of things that keep correct time following time. Some are facts you ought to include into your application, plus some are what you should be avoided no matter what. The tips in this post will set you on the proper path to a much healthier entire body as well as a more comfortable life.
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Babies flick 'anti-risk switch' in women but not men
ScienceDaily (Apr. 17, 2012) ? Unlike women, men don't curb certain risk-taking behaviours when a baby is present, a new psychology study at the University of Warwick suggests. Whereas women are significantly more cautious when they are partnered with small children in a gambling game measuring their attitude to risk, men don't substantially alter their willingness to take a chance.
Researchers suggested this could be due to evolutionary forces that select for men who are more competitive and risk-seeking in order to establish status and women who are more risk-averse in order to protect their offspring.
Scientists at the University of Warwick and the University of Basel observed students playing a gambling game while alone and while paired with either an image of an attractive man, woman or baby with whom they imagined they would share their winnings.
A second less surprising finding of the study was that men took more risks when partnered with other men -- consistent with theories suggesting that men are driven to compete with other men in order to maximise their reproductive opportunities.
However men did not increase their risk-taking behaviour when paired with a woman, a fact researchers believed was down to the co-operative design of the game where participants shared their winnings with their partner.
This particular finding has parallels in the real world where studies have shown that men in committed relationships show less risky behaviour as they no longer need to compete with other males to gain a woman's attention.
Dr Thomas Hills of the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick said: "To our knowledge this is the first study to look directly at the effect of babies on male and female risk-taking.
"Our attitudes to risk form a big part of our personality and determine our behaviour in all sorts of areas -- for example how we approach financial investments or what leisure activities we indulge in.
"Even though the women in the study were not the mothers of the babies they paired with, just having a baby involved in the game was enough to substantially change their behaviour.
"It's as if babies turn off women's a willingness to take a risk -- but interestingly the same doesn't apply to men."
The study was published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
Eighty undergraduate students (40 male and 40 female) took part in the study.
The participants accumulated cash while pumping up a computer-simulated balloon which could explode randomly at any moment.
As the game progressed, participants had to decide whether to stop pumping and "bank" the winnings -- or whether to continue and risk the balloon exploding and all the cash being lost.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Warwick, via AlphaGalileo.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Dominic Fischer, Thomas T. Hills. The baby effect and young male syndrome: social influences on cooperative risk-taking in women and men. Evolution and Human Behavior, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.01.006
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
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Monday, April 16, 2012
MagicPlan 2.0 Arrives: Create Instant Floor Plans Using Your iPhone Or iPad?s Camera
Augmented reality isn't always totally pointless. Sorry if you think it's hugely useful to see an augmented view of tweets around you just by holding up your phone, but I like to find slightly more advanced applications using the technology. One such app, MagicPlan, fits that description. From the two-year old startup Sensopia, the MagicPlan iOS app is rolling out version 2.0 of its floor plan capturing application today, which allows you to hold up your phone then scan the dimensions of the room to create an instant floor plan.kevin martin 2012 senior bowl chuck series finale welcome back kotter 2001 a space odyssey barefoot bandit polar bear plunge
Sergey Brin: Web Freedom Faces Its Greatest Threat Ever [Blockquote]
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