A sign of things to come?  While attending virtual college has many disadvantages over the buzz of being with real people, it will certainly play an increasing part in future education.  The Open University have been doing it for years and many traditional further education establishments are opening up a virtual arm. 

Immune system can drive cancers into dormant state
A multinational team of researchers has shown for the first time that the immune system can stop the growth of a cancerous tumor without actually killing it.

I read an article some years ago talking about our fondness for the use of war metaphors, particularly in science – can’t find the original, but this sums it up: The war against war metaphors
 
…militaristic language pops up in almost every scientific domain: conservation biology (“invasive species,” “biosecurity”); global warming (“global war on global warming”); and biomedicine (“killer cells,” “hitting multiple targets”).
…Scientists who frame problems in a militaristic manner also likely have a drastically limited perception of the problem and how to tackle it…

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/war12june03.html also talks of how unhelpful the phrases “War on Cancer” and “War on Terror” are.  They imply there is one big enemy and that a decisive victory is the only way forward.  Stalemate would been seen as losing and therefore not an option.

Also reminded of a book on complexity in the workplace that stressed the importance of a project team developing their own language to create a coherance in the way the group work together.  Great book: The Intelligence Advantage – Organizing for Complexity by Michael D. McMasters.

Blogged with Flock

Not going to comment as I’m supposed to be doing my tax return, but interesting….

What a person says is not necessarily an indication of what that person knows because speech is motivated by social circumstances and the desire to influence the listener

http://www.physorg.com/news97159923.html

I wonder how much influence the toys we play with as children have on our grown up mentality? I just say a TV ad for a supermarket checkout till, in plastic, aimed at 5-6 year old girls, that prompted them to “put through the milk now”, “now put through the red item”, “well done!”. And this was an educational toy! At first I thought this was aimed at the number one pastime of younge people today, shopping. But no, the child is not shopping, they are operating the till. In my day nobody wanted to grow up to work the tills in the shops, I hope things havn’t changed so much that this reflects the aspirations of todays kids.

On a related theme, I read an article somewhere that was asking if electronic toys were any good for children. The conclusion was that those that just commanded them to do things were not, being told what to do it not play after all, but that any toy that the child could control and use as part of their imaginary world was just fine. Makes sense to me.

I had to contact the dreaded Barclays again and they informed me, as if they had read my last post, that as I had banked with them for 17 years (which makes me only 34!) I was eligible for a special savings account! Lucky me. I wonder if I would also be eligible if I had only banked with them for a year, or is that being too cynical?

At what point, if ever, do we say that the risks from climate change are so high it is worth the risk of trying human intervention on a massive scale? We do not have a very good record when it comes to our tampering with nature. Introduced predators get out of hand, coral reefs made from tyres disintegrate. We just don’t understand the natural world well enough to know what the side effects will be. But at some point will it be worth the risk?

He is a possible solution on a grand scale, increasing alkalinity of the oceans by accelerating natural weathering: http://www.physorg.com/news113637002.html

Blogged with Flock

Mods to linux:
1. Modified .bashrc in my home directory and root and added:

alias rm=’rm -i’
alias cp=’cp -i’
alias mv=’mv -i’

alias ls=’ls -laF –color’

(used vi, ugh http://freeengineer.org/learnUNIXin10minutes.html#Vi)

2. installed emacs

yum install emacs

3. Copied previously zipped domain code from old server using ftp mput

(http://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/ftp.html)

and unzipped into domain directories

/var/www/vhosts/ggjump.com/httpdocs

and change ownership

chown -R pbright *

4. Setup locate database

Checked not already in cron

crontab -l

Added /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron to run daily using Plesk
Ran script to get it started
sh /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron

5. Used to having domains in /home so put in dynamic links

ln -s /var/www/vhosts/ggjump.com/httpdocs
etc.

6. Get mysql server accessible from desktop

cd /home
7. Transferred data from mysql databases using Navicat and for each database create new users.

7.5 Create Domain template and User Phoebe Bright

8. For each domain
In domain part of godaddy
- setup nameservers (http://help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=653&topic;_id=60)
- in nameserver put in new names, eg. ns1.ggjump.com
- modify index.php for this domain so I can tell when/if transfer takes place

9. Install ZendGData
http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=76585&topic;=12027#appendix
- downloaded and installed in /usr/include/php/ZendGdata
- amended /etc/php.ini include
include_path = “.:/usr/include/php:/usr/include/php/ZendGdata”
restart

10. Customised php.ini
- display_errors on
- log_errors off
- safe_mode off
restart

11. Fixed default safe_mode on

For each domain, when setting up make sure the safe mode tickbox next to the php tickbox is set to off. There are domain specific settings for php in
# /var/www/vhosts/ggjump.com/conf/vhost.conf
# /var/www/vhosts/ggjump.com/subdomains//conf/vhost.conf
can modify these manually but likely to be overwritten.

Here is a FabLab type idea that enables anyone to make electronic gadgets without skill. Still basic but good to see the type of innovations we are used to in software moving into the physical world.

http://www.buglabs.net/