Archive for April 8th, 2008
Kylie says ‘I was misdiagnosed’
Posted on: April 8, 2008
- In: awareness | breast cancer | diagnosis | experts | Kylie | Minogue | misdiagnosed
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Kylie Minogue has revealed on US TV that the first doctor she saw failed to diagnose she had breast cancer.
The 39-year-old singer, who announced she had the illness in 2005, was speaking on Ellen DeGeneres’ chat show.
“Because someone is in a white coat and using big medical instruments doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right,” said the Australian star.
Minogue added she continued with her Showgirl tour having seen a doctor who told her she was perfectly healthy.
The star said she had heard stories from other women who had been to see a doctor for a diagnosis and were told things were fine.
‘Intuition’
“I don’t want to say that to frighten people but that’s just a fact,” said Minogue.
DeGeneres revealed she had had a lumpectomy after finding a lump in her breast.
“I had just had a mammogram and they didn’t find anything and a couple of weeks later I found a lump,” she said.
In a warning to other women Minogue said: “You must follow your intuition and if you have any doubt go back again”.
Last year she revealed how her “anger” at having cancer helped energise her in the recording studio once she completed her treatment.
Soon after Minogue’s diagnosis experts reported an increase of breast cancer awareness amongst women.
Her new album, X which was released last year, reached number four in the UK Top 40.
Meet the innovators
Posted on: April 8, 2008
- In: 2008 Millennium Technology Prize. | biggest | innovators | Meet | prize | technology | world's
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Four innovations and their creators have been shortlisted for the world’s biggest technology prize, the 2008 Millennium Technology Prize.
But what are they and what impact have they had on the world?
DNA FINGERPRINTING
The DNA fingerprinting technique developed by British geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys has revolutionised the field of forensic science, and police detective work.
It has also played an important role in the resolution of paternity and immigration disputes.
DNA fingerprints are examined all around the world, even in portable laboratories, and the equipment for genetic fingerprinting is being made by dozens of companies globally.
Sir Alec discovered the technique for DNA fingerprinting in a “Eureka” moment while examining an X-ray that formed part of a DNA experiment, analysing genetic markers for fundamental human studies.
What the experiment revealed, unexpectedly, were extraordinarily variable DNA patterns showing simple inheritance in his technician’s family’s DNA. Sir Alec realised the importance of this discovery, which was in effect a biological identification method.
“That moment changed my life,” he says. And it led to the development of techniques that would fundamentally change this area of science.
Sir Alec is Professor of Genetics at the University of Leicester and continues to work at the genetics laboratory.
ERBIUM-DOPED FIBRE AMPLIFIER (EDFA)
The innovation of Prof David Payne, Dr Emmanuel Desurvire and Dr Randy Giles, has transformed global telecommunications, particularly the world of high-speed and long-distance communication.
Amplifiers are need to boost degraded light signals as they travel through the fibre.
The EDFA eliminated a key problem of amplification in the 1980s, namely the need to convert the light into an electrical signal and then resend with a new laser.
The work or Desurvire, Giles and Payne reduced the cost of creating long-distance fibre-optic networks and “unleashed” the bandwidth of long-distance fibre-optics networks.
The EDFA has led to the rapid rise of the global net, impacting business, education and leisure for billions of people.
The breakthrough of the three scientists was to use the heavy element erbium, which was perfect for amplifying the signal of light used in fibre optic networks.
The first commercial application of the EDFA was in underwater communication cables. The amplifiers sit inside torpedo-like repeaters that are placed in cable every 500km to 800km.
The introduction of these amplifiers led to the depression of the communication satellite markets.
EFDAs are now found in fibre optic networks around the world and the latest amplifiers are the size of a match box.
THE VITERBI ALGORITHM
Dr Andrew Viterbi’s innovation has touched the lives of potentially billions of people. His algorithm advanced the design and implementation of modern wireless communication systems by simplifying the complex and convoluted world of signal processing.
The algorithm is an error-correction scheme for digital communications and is now used every day in billions of mobile phone calls, satellite communications, wireless networks and even MP3 players.
He published his algorithm in 1967 but it did not find an application until computing power became powerful enough to deal with the massive calculations needed to apply it.
Taking the advice of his lawyer, who felt there was no general application for the algorithm, he did not patent it.
He co-founded Qualcomm, helping develop the popular CDMA standard, which is a rival to GSM, and is in use in 3G networks around the world today.
BIOMATERIALS FOR CONTROLLED DRUG RELEASE
Prof Robert Langer is a pioneer of many new technologies, including transdermal delivery systems, which allow the administration of drugs through the skin without needles or other invasive methods.
His work in drug-releasing polymers eventually led to the creation of a novel way to treat brain cancer.
His research into polymers has allowed for more accurate and controlled release of drugs into the body.
Polymers include plastics, DNA and proteins, and while they are mostly thought of as plastics, polymers comprise a large class of natural and synthetic materials with a variety of properties and purposes.
Prof Langer’s breakthrough was to create a three-dimensional matrix structure for polymers which allowed the drug molecules to pass through and into the patient’s system.
His work has also brought about significant advances in tissue engineering, including synthetic replacement for biological tissues.
He has more than 600 issued and pending patents, has published approximately 1,000 articles and 13 books, and is known as the father of controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering.
Al Fayed abandons Diana campaign
Posted on: April 8, 2008
- In: abandons | Al Fayed | campaign | Diana
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Mohamed Al Fayed has announced that he is abandoning his 10-year campaign to prove that Princess Diana and his son Dodi were murdered in a conspiracy.
He said he would accept the inquest jury’s verdict of unlawful killing due to the “gross negligence” of driver Henri Paul and the paparazzi.
Mr Al Fayed told ITV’s News at Ten that he was doing it for the sake of Diana’s sons, Princes William and Harry.
However, he said he had reservations about the outcome of the inquest.
I am leaving the rest for God to get my revenge
Mohamed Al Fayed
Harrods owner Mr Al Fayed said: “Enough is enough, and for the sake of the two princes, whom I know they love their mother and how close they be, I saw them during the holiday and I am sure they are blessing in their deep heart what I am doing to discover the truth.
“But as I say, I have enough. I am leaving the rest for God to get my revenge. But I am not doing anything any more.”
The jury of six women and five men returned joint verdicts of unlawful killing through grossly negligent driving – or gross negligence manslaughter – of both the couple’s vehicle and following ones, by majorities of nine to two.
Following the inquest, the princes issued a statement saying: “We agree with their verdicts and are both hugely grateful.”
Tunnel crash
The inquest into the crash 10 years ago, which also killed Mr Paul, lasted six months.
The Mercedes carrying the princess and Dodi Al Fayed crashed into a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris in the early hours of 31 August 1997.
Mohamed Al Fayed had maintained that Diana and Dodi were murdered in a plot by the Duke of Edinburgh and MI6.
After the verdicts Mr Al Fayed said in a statement: “For 10 years I have endured two police investigations. The French and the Scotland Yard inquiries were wrong. These inquests prove it. They said it was an accident and their findings are now dismissed.”
The total cost to British taxpayers of investigating Princess Diana’s death is expected to top £10m.
- In: Google | Google App Engine | Head | Jumps | Web Services
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With Google App Engine
Michael Arrington
195 comments »
Our live coverage of the Google App Engine launch event is here (Update: we’ve built and launched a test application here).
Google isn’t just talking about hosting applications in the cloud any more. Tonight at 9pm PT they’re launching Google App Engine (Update: The site is live), an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform. It consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access (anticipated here and here) and GFS data store services.
At first blush this is a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).
Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.
What this all means: Google App Engine is designed for developers who want to run their entire application stack, soup to nuts, on Google resources. Amazon, by contrast, offers more of an a la carte offering with which developers can pick and choose what resources they want to use.
Google Product Manager Tom Stocky described the new service to me in an interview today. Developers simply upload their Python code to Google, launch the application, and can monitor usage and other metrics via a multi-platform desktop application.
More details from Google:
Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.
Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:
Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.
Google App Engine: The Limitations
The service is launching in beta and has a number of limitations.
First, only the first 10,000 developers to sign up for the beta will be allowed to deploy applications.
The service is completely free during the beta period, but there are ceilings on usage. Applications cannot use more than 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day. We’re told this equates to about 5M pageviews/mo for the typical web app. After the beta period, those ceilings will be removed, but developers will need to pay for any overage. Google has not yet set pricing for the service.
One current limitation is a requirement that applications be written in Python, a popular scripting language for building modern web apps (Ruby and PHP are among others widely used). Google says that Python is just the first supported language, and that the entire infrastructure is designed to be language neutral. Google’s initial focus on Python makes sense because they use Python internally as their scripting language (and they hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2005).
Update: Here is Guido van Rossum at the launch event talking about App Engine:
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CrunchBase Information
Google
Website:
google.com
Location:
Mountain View, California, United States
Founded:
January 1, 1998
IPO:
August 19, 2004
Google primarily provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of tools and platforms including its more popular… Learn More
Guido van Rossum
Website:
www.python.org/~guido
Companies:
Google, Zing
Guido is the author of the popular Python programming language. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit.
He moved from the Netherlands to the… Learn More
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- In: Experience | Flickr | launches | Unique | Video
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Flickr users can now add video clips alongside their photos, a much requested and much anticipated feature that has been promised for over a year.
The puppet version of Shel Israel graciously kicked things off for us by announcing the new feature in the Flickr Video below.
The product is not a YouTube clone by any means. The Flickr team, led by Director of Product Management Kakul Srivastava, spent considerable time debating the feature set and user experience internally before launch.
The goal is not to have people upload long videos or clips of copyrighted material. To reinforce that, videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size (however these limitations may be changed later, Srivastava says).
In a phone prebriefing, I was very critical of the length limitation. But the team then brought me in for a demo and I was sold. The short clips are a perfect compliment to event photos, in my opinion.
Videos are treated the same way as photos and are placed alongside those photos in albums and the main stream. Videos can also be tagged (and geotagged) in the same way as photos.
The video player itself is extremely clean, so videos look like photos on pages that include them. Videos can also be embedded, of course, as we’ve done above.
Another great feature is the ability to play the videos from the thumbnail screens as well as the permanent page for the video.
Flickr video also differentiates itself from YouTube by only allowing pro users upload videos (it costs $25/yr to be a pro user), although both free and pro users can view videos. As with photos, videos can be made public or private. They can also be shared/embedded individually or as part of sets. But like YouTube, Flickr is providing an API for programmers to create services that access videos hosted on Flickr.
Other standard Flickr features are also available for video, such as search by tags and descriptions, uploads directly from camera phones, and various licensing options.
With this launch, video sharing sites that have focused on privately shared videos should be worried. These include Motionbox, Viddyou, and Vimeo, among others.
Update: The Flickr blog blatantly rips off our puppet schtick:
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CrunchBase Information
Flickr
Website:
www.flickr.com
Location:
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Acquired:
March 1, 2005 by Yahoo! for $35M in Cash
Former game designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake created Flickr, an online photo sharing network, in 2004. Flickr, which began as a photo-sharing feature of their gaming project, has since then blossomed into one of the premire… Learn
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