I am opposed to mandatory vaccination, even though I believe vaccination is an important public health measure that will save millions of lives. But there isn't enough vaccine for everyone in the world, so if people in the US don't want it, then any unused stock (keeping a small reserve) should be released by a date certain (say January 15 for the sake of argument) and given to others. I believe this will doom many Americans to severe sickness and some to a fatal illness, but the compensation is that many others, children and adults, in poorer parts of the world will be saved.

Läs mer: Swine flu vaccines, adjuvants, equity, safety: more discussion : Effect Measure

Ny Teknik skriver om ett kardborreband som kan hålla 35 ton, och det är återanvändbart. Apropå det där med att återanvända det, i kommentarsfältet:

Kan bli jobbigt att återanvända om det krävs 35ton dragkraft föratt få upp det igen;)

Läs mer: Kardborreband av stål tål 35 ton - Ny Teknik

Efter att ha gått igenom 1800 donatorers antikroppar mot HIV har man hittat en man som har två antikroppar som var för sig massivt överträffar alla andra donatorers antikroppar. Dessa två superantikroppar binder på ett sätt som man inte inriktat sig på tidigare, en trippelupprepning på viruset, en trimer.

Man hoppas att viruset inte kan förändra denna del så enkelt.

They found that about 10 per cent of the donors made so-called "broadly-neutralising antibodies" (bNAbs) that recognise multiple strains of HIV. Eventually the researchers whittled these down to two extremely potent antibodies – both from the same African donor – that massively outperformed the others.

One, codenamed PG9, neutralised 127 of 162 HIV strains and the other, codenamed PG16, neutralised 119.

Summary

The Dell Vostro 1015 is a capable machine with

• a good screen
• good battery life (according to Dell, not according to me, if you get the small battery)
  
• good connectivity
  
• a good webcam
•  a good price,

... but is somewhat let down by its substandard keyboard and touchpad.

Keyboard and touchpad +

The keyboard is the part of the 1015 that I least agree with so far. It flexes in the middle a bit, mushy in feel, but the tops of the keys are spaced ok with a gap in between them. The Pg Up and Pg Down keys are awkwardly placed; they are in a column with Home above and End below them. I would have preferred them to be positioned left and right of the up arrow key instead. Keys are a bit unresponsive and some key presses of mine are not recorded as I type if I type with a light touch. No back lighting of the keys.

The touchpad is too small and has a scroll function along the right and bottom edges that I don't agree with. This scroll functionality can be shut off in the OS, but I would have preferred the scroll strips to be separated from the touch pad, and in the best of worlds, I would like to do apple style finger combinations on the touch pad.

Update: I have just enabled software in Ubuntu Linux on the machine, that allows multi touch with two finger scrolling, yay!.

Connectivity

• Bluetooth
• 4 USB ports
• VGA
• Wireless
• Gbit Ethernet
• 56K modem
• IEE1394 (Firewire)
• ExpressCard slot

...are all Included but no HDMI, and the wireless does not handle 802.11n draft. There is also a built in web cam with a generous 2mpix resolution, and it gives sharp video. 4 star rating due to inclusion of Firewire and Bluetooth on such a cheap laptop and a decent resolution on the web cam.

Ports

Left hand side ports: VGA (outside of picture), Ethernet and two of the USB ports. The ExpressCard port cover has the blue LEDs for power, networking. Bluetooth and hard disk activity shining through it from the front. BTW manufacturers, go back to red LEDs, they are much less intrusive in the dark

There are no connectors on the back side. Instead they are on the left, right and front edges which I believe is par for the course nowadays. Placing them along both sides means you get locked in by cables while sitting.  As an example the power cord is on the right hand side and the Ethernet cord on the left hand side.  So when you stand up, lifting the laptop out of your lap, you're trapped. If the VGA port on the left hand side traded places with the power connector's, 90% of the time you could have all cables on the left hand side only. The sound connectors are in the front which means when connected, the cable connectors poke into your belly.

Screen +

The only reliable high contrast screen laptop manufacturers are Apple and Sony, but Dell often has very good brightness and contrast on their laptops (see notebookcheck.net). The screen of the 1015 is bright, but I suspect the contrast is just OK. The vertical viewing angle is narrow. Contrast trick: tilting the screen slightly away seems at least subjectively to increase contrast and there is enough brightness anyway. The screen is not blank but instead has a matte surface, so no glare from light sources behind you. The screen is fairly low resolution at 1280x800 1366x768. The store where I bought it lists the resolution as 1280x800 on their site, but the xrandr program on my machine reports it to be 1366x768 pixels. This gives it a 16:9 aspect ratio, which is the HDTV aspect ratio.

Battery life ?
According to Dell it has a good battery life, but on Ubuntu Linux I get about 90 minutes which is not so good. That is with the 4 cell battery and with full backlighting and WiFi and Bluetooth switched on, no DVD activity. Linux is known to be much worse at power consumption so possibly the battery life would be better under Windows, something I have not tried. The Linux program dmidecode reports the battery to have a  22Wh capacity which is kind of on the low side for a battery in a laptop. Dell Sweden does not carry the 1015 at all, Dell UK carries it but not the batteries, but on the Dell US site one can see that the 6 cell battery at 48Wh, has more than double the capacity of the 4 cell. Some versions odf the 1015 ship with a 6 cell battery.

Verdict

It is cheap, especially with a low end processor like the Celeron-equipped one that I bought. If you tolerate the keyboard and touchpad it is a good buy.

I got mine pre-built from a third party since I needed it urgently and there was a significant difference in price in that store up to the C2D. Had I had the time to order one custom built directly from Dell it would have been with a C2D and bigger battery. Actually after looking at the Swedish Dell store I see that they do not carry the 1015. How odd. Dell UK seems to carry it and judging from the hits on this article my guess it is also available in Germany, Poland and India (but I haven't checked).

Had I gone with the more expensive pre-built C2D I probably would have been irritated with the mushy keyboard for the price so I made the right call. Again for the price the screen is quite good. I have had it a week now, and so far it delivers for the price. The Celeron model I got was as noted pre-built and has the small 4-cell battery and I have not had time to check how long the battery lasts on Windows (I am chiefly running Linux on it which may shorten battery life compared to Windows).

My Toshiba L30-149 just presented garbage on screen after an upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10. It persisted in doing so when I continued the upgrade to 9.04. I used the below guide. The proprietary fglrx driver was replaced and after that I stopped getting garbage on screen and instead got a login screen.

This guide will show you how to use the Free, Open Source driver for many ATI graphics cards called "radeon" or "ati". It will provide 2D and 3D acceleration in your video hardware. This driver is not as fast as the closed-source, proprietary "fglrx" driver from AMD/ATI Inc. for some cards, but has better dual-head support, and supports some older chipsets that fglrx does not.

Läs mer: The open source ATI driver (xserver-xorg-video-ati) - Community Ubuntu Documentation

Webworks and Betahaus NGO are moving together to our new Plonista-friendly headquarters at Skeppsbron, Stockholm, Sweden.

 Photo by webbfredag, captions added

We will now have more space. The office right now consists of collapsible conference tables and chairs but soon there will be sofas, carpets and chandeliers as well we hope (and the odd desk).

Stockholm-residing plonistas Raphael Ritz and Israel Saeta Perez met up with us (me, Robin Harms and Martin Lundwall) and helped us evaluate the offices with regards to use it as a space for Plone talk, beer and pizzas. The evaluation was favorable :-)

Environment: A washing machine uses thousands of nylon beads, and just a cup of water, to provide a greener way to do the laundry

Läs mer: Monitor: Washing without water | The Economist

Dynamically linked libraries (.so under Unix, .dll on Microsoft) code cannot use static addresses internally because the code may appear in different places in memory in different situations. DNA has this too, where it is called 'transposing code':

Läs mer: DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

Ett virus som H1N1 gör ett skrivfel per tio tusen baspar, vilket innebär i snitt att varje nya kopia av viruset har en mutation. Om man då tänker på de miljoner kopior som görs, så inser man att sannolikheten att något individuellt virus får en farligare mutation är hög.

Dessutom är H1N1s DNA delat i sex delar i stället för att hänga ihop i en lång tråd. Det innebär att om en cell infekteras av flera olika virus kan dessa rekombinera sina delar med varandra, och det är för övrigt så som H1N1 förmodligen skapats, med DNA-fragment från virus som gått på människa, fågel respektive gris.

It turns out that Influenza packs inside its virus capsule a protein complex (RNA-dependent RNA polymerase) that is customized for its style of RNA copying. Significantly, it omits the error checking protein. The result is that there is about one error made in copying every 10,000 base pairs. How long is the Influenza genome? About 13,000 base pairs. Thus, on average, every copy of an Influenza virus has one random mutation in it.

This is part of the reason why the novel H1N1 is called a “triple-reassortant” virus: through either a series of dual-infections, or perhaps a single calamitous infection of multiple flu varieties, the novel H1N1 acquired a mix of RNA snippets that has bestowed upon it high transmission rates along with no innate human immunity to the virus, i.e., the perfect storm for a pandemic.

Läs mer: On Influenza A (H1N1) « bunnie's blog

I nya Zeeland ser det ut så här:

Man kan notera att spädbarnen ligger illa till, och att om man är gammal och får viruset så är det inte så bra. Observera också att det är lika stor risk att bli smittad om man är i 50-59 som i 40-49. Det "skydd" som kickar in när man blir äldre verkar komma efter 59, och man tror ju att det är något som hände runt 1957 som gav immunitet, men här skulle man jukunna tro att det är 1949

Eurosurveillance - View Article

I Tyskland så här:

Väldigt få fall bland spädbarn.

A Gilsdorf ()¹, G Poggensee¹, on behalf of the working group pandemic influenza A(H1N1)v^1,2
Läs mer: Eurosurveillance - View Article

Det är mycket högre andel barn i Nya Zeeland. Kanske någon skillnad i metodik? Smittovägar?

Nya Zeeland är ett av de hårdast drabbade länderna och är mitt i isn vanliga influensasäsong. Ändå börjar svininfluensan klinga av, och ingen vet riktigt varför.

Den europeiska medicinska tidskriften Eurosurveillance är en tidskrift som finns öppet tillgänglig på nätet:

All surveillance systems currently show a consistent decline in pandemic disease rates in all areas of New Zealand. This decline cannot be fully explained. New Zealand is still in the middle of its traditional influenza season, the A (H1N1)v virus appears relatively infectious, and we estimate that so far only about 11% of the population have been infected by this novel agent. Similar patterns of a relatively short epidemic have also be reported in other countries in the southern hemisphere, notably Australia

Den europeiska medicinska tidskriften Eurosurveillance är något så trevligt som en tidskrift som finns öppet tillgänglig på nätet. De tio tusen första tyska fallen har analyserats (Eurosurveillance - View Article). Ingen har dött(!) i Tyskland, så det här är en analys av de som man identifierat som sjuka bara. Här några diagram ur artikeln

After the detailed examination of the first 100 cases in the early phase of the pandemic [1], we analyse here data of the first 9,950 cases in Germany, with a focus on information regarding the risk groups, hospitalisation frequency and other factors contributing to the impact this pandemic has on the healthcare system, in order to guide further public health measures.

A Gilsdorf ()¹, G Poggensee¹, on behalf of the working group pandemic influenza A(H1N1)v^1,2

Läs mer: Eurosurveillance - View Article

Brittiska The Guardian är ett av de få ställen på Internet som fortfarande försöker att uppdatera siffror om hur många som är sjuka och har dött över hela världen. I deras sorterbar tabell kan man bland annat se vilka som har högst procent dödsfall i svinfluensa. Jag har tagit bort småländer nedan, men notera att alla utom Costa Rica ligger på södra halvklotet. Dödsfall per miljon invånare:

Costa Rica ligger i sin tur inte så långt från ekvatorn.

There are some caveats: not all of these cases have been confirmed as swine flu in the lab; the dates in the spread sheet are mostly the dates they have been reported in the media, not the dates reported to the medical authorities. We've also left off a lot of the suspected cases, just because we're not sure about the source.

Läs mer: Full list of swine flu cases, country by country | News | guardian.co.uk

Man har nu lyckats göra små bubblor fyllda med helium som ligger stilla i luften och som i vindtunnlar kan ge mer precision i mätningar:

The 3-millimetre bubbles swirl around cars in a wind tunnel. Engineers at automotive research consultants Mira in Nuneaton, UK, use 12 cameras to track the bubbles, and so capture air flows in unprecedented detail (see video, above).

Läs mer: Soap bubbles to take the drag out of future cars - tech - 29 August 2009 - New Scientist

Nokia kommer att släppa en ny telefon, som kör Linux. Den är inte låst vid java-applikationer (vilket jag tror Android är), och den har ett utdragbart tangentbord. Så det ser ut som om vi har tre konkurrenter nu

• Iphone - I särklass störst, med ett Appleutvecklat gränssnitt ovanpå FreeBSD. Hoppas vinna på ren egen förmåga till design och användbarhet. Vinner stor just nu.
• Android - Backat av Google, en öppen plattform fokuserad på javaapplikationer med ett nytt användargränssnitt. Hoppas vinna på öppen plattform där man kan återanvända Linux- och javakunskaper som utvecklare.
• Nokia/Maemo - Linux, som är mer standard än Android såvitt jag kan se. Hoppas vinna på öppen plattform där man kan återanvända mer Linux- och programutvecklingskunskaper som utvecklare jämfört med Android.

Och på just denna modell ett riktigt, fysiskt tangentbord. Vi får se om Nokia får ett utvecklarcommunity runt denna.

In hardware, Nokia makes clear the N900's role as an effective replacement for the N97 and the company's answer to the iPhone 3GS. The QWERTY slider design has the same 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor as the Apple smartphone and a faster graphics core that, again like Apple, supports OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics features. GPS and Wi-Fi are similarly onboard. However, the N900 brings much more app memory at up to 1GB (256MB actual RAM), full HSPA-based 3G at up to 10Mbps down and 2Mbps up, and a much sharper 800x480, 3.5-inch touchscreen. The 5-megapixel camera and 32GB of storage are also carried over from the N97, but a microSDHC slot lets users add at least another 16GB with today's cards.

Läs mer: Electronista | Nokia N900 official, uses Linux to 'kill' iPhone

Googling for lists of Internet radio stations I noticed that many of the top hits were listings that led you to pop-up players. That's no good for building your own list of urls (presets) for your sound player of choice. If you want to find the urls directly for the feeds, take a look at Radio-Locator:

Welcome to Radio-Locator, the most comprehensive radio station search engine on the internet. We have links to over 10,000 radio station web pages and over 2500 audio streams from radio stations in the U.S. and around the world.

The info icon at each station leads to a page that lists the url of the feed. The flash icon may lead directly to the url too (not tested yet by me). All stations in the directory also broadcast over the air but not all have Internet feeds. However on teh front pgae you can search for Internet-present stations by genre.

  Radio-Locator

The news of the delivery of around 200,000 packs of the vaccine came as it was announced that the UK death toll from swine flu has risen to 66 after 11 fatalities in the past week.

Läs mer: Swine flu vaccine arrives in UK but roll-out will have to wait | World news | guardian.co.uk

(uppdaterad 2011-11-08 med länkar fixade)

Det kan vara svårt att lista ut hur mycket ljus man får från en viss typ av lampa. Som jag minns det så ger en vanlig glödlampa 95% värme och 5% ljus, en halogenlampa 90% och 10% ljus och lysrör (inklusive lysrörslampor) 80% värme och 20% ljus. Men hur mycket ger LED-lampor och stämmer procenten som jag skrev där i början? LED-lampor anges ofta i Lumen. Wikipedia har svaret:

• 100W glödlampa ung. 14 lumen/Watt
• 100W halogen ung. 17 lumen/Watt
• LED 10-150 lumen/Watt
• Lysrör 70-100 lumen/Watt
• Lysrörslampa 46-72 lumen/Watt

Lumen är den totala ljusutstrålningen justerad för det ljus ögat har mest nytta av.

Min erfarenhet är att LED-lampor ofta ligger åt det kalla hållet vad gäller ljuskvalitet. Lampor rankas enligt ljustemperatur, där ett lägre värde (säg 2500K) är varmare i ljuset än ett högre (säg 3200K). De LED-lampor som har rekord i ljuseffektivitet verkar stråla ut väldigt kallt (blått) ljus.

På Wikipedia kan man läsa följande om LED-lampor.

• Utvecklingen går framåt med LED och förbättringar vad gäller verkningsgrad inträffar ofta
• De vanliga LED-lamporna klara bara av några tiotals milliampere, försöker man trycka igenom mer och samtidigt kyla dem så blir verkningsgraden sämre
• Det finns dock något som kallas Power LEDs, och de klarar någon till några Ampere
• Lysdioder har idag samma verkningsgrad ungefär som lysrör, runt 100 Lumen per Watt. Lysdioder kan verka kallare och effektivare därför att de skickar ut väldigt lite värmestrålning med ljuskäglan, men istället så genererar de mycket värme vid sin bas. Därför behöver kraftigare LED en kylfläns för att göra sig av med värmen, när andra ljustyper "gör sig av" med värmen genom att stråla ut den tillsammans med ljuset.
• LED genererar ofta mycket blått ljus som kan vara skadligt för ögat i större doser
• LED kan inte skicka lika mycket ljus åt alla håll, såsom en ideal punktkälla kan

One of the key advantages of LED-based lighting is its high efficiency, as measured by its light output per unit power input. White LEDs quickly matched and overtook the efficiency of standard incandescent lighting systems. In 2002, Lumileds made five-watt LEDs available with a luminous efficacy of 18–22 lumens per watt [lm/W]. For comparison, a conventional 60–100 W incandescent lightbulb produces around 15 lm/W, and standard fluorescent lights produce up to 100 lm/W. A recurring problem is that efficiency will fall dramatically for increased current. This effect is known as droop and effectively limits the light output of a given LED, increasing heating more than light output for increased current.

Läs mer: Light-emitting diode - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Modern software is tremendously complicated, and the methods that teams use to manage its development reflect this complexity. Though many organizations use revision-control software to track and manage the complexity of a project as it evolves, the topic of how to make an informed choice of revision-control tools has received scant attention. Until fairly recently, the world of revision control was moribund, so there was simply not much to say on this subject.

Läs mer: Making Sense of Revision-control Systems - ACM Queue

Den sjunde augusti börjad man testa svininfluensavaccinet på människor i USA, och än så länge har inga biverkningar observerats. Men eftersom man totalt testar "bara" på några tusen så kan det ju hända att biverkningar uppstår senare, men jag antar att ju mer sällsynt en reaktion är, desto mer osäkert är det om det  är vaccinet som orsakat det, eftersom det är svårare att göra en statitistisk korrelation då. Artikeln nämner inte hur många man hunnit testa det på än, men nu har man också börjat testa på barn.

Clinical trials in adults began on Aug. 7, and those in children on Wednesday.

Läs mer: No Side Effects So Far in Trial of Swine Flu Shot - NYTimes.com