Bulgarian Politician Punished for Playing Farmville During Budget Meetings | Discoblog

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Zynga-Farmville-FacebookOn Facebook, the Farmville updates are impossible to avoid–someone is looking for a cow, someone else is watering their crops. People who have never played the game may not understand how addictive it is, but here’s some proof. The game can not only suck away large portions of your day, it can also, as one councilmember in Bulgaria’s second largest city found out, get you demoted.

While many distracted politicians twiddle their thumbs during meetings or frantically jab at their Blackberries, city councilors in Plovdiv were apparently playing Farmville during budgetary debates.

The Escapist writes:

Council Chair Ilko Iliev “strongly scolded the eager internet farmers,” who nonetheless continued to spend time on their farms while attending council meetings.

Finally, during a meeting last Thursday, in order to send a message to the rest of the Farmville-playing community, one councilmember was given the boot. Councilor Dimitar Kerin was voted off the budget committee, said fellow councilor Todot Hristov, because “he needed more time for his virtual farm.”

The Escapist added:

But he’s not leaving without a fight. “The troubled councilor has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants,” according to a report by Novinte.com. “He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.”

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Image: Farmville



Industrial Software: Boon or Bogus?

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ERP, EAM, MES, CMMS, energy monitoring, valve monitoring… the list of application specific industrial software designed to increase productivity goes on and on. Do you use application specific industrial software (beyond Microsoft Office programs) on a regular basis? Do they live up to expecta

How Much to Go Green?

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Engineers are under pressure to create sustainable designs. Do you understand environmental impact analysis technology? Do you know environmental compliance requirements on a global basis? And are you aware of the potential economic trade-offs? Using this product analytics software, engineers can sc

Toads—Yes, Toads—May Know When an Earthquake Is Coming | 80beats

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Bufo_BufoThe wave of high-profile seismic activity so far in 2010 has been another reminder that we humans could use all the help we can get in predicting earthquakes. This week in the Journal of Zoology, biologist Rachel Grant suggests a new way: Watch the toads.

Taking cues from the animal kingdom is not itself a new idea (not by a long shot): Reports of animal earthquake prediction are legion and they date back to at least 373 BCE, when historians record that animals including rats, snakes and weasels flocked out of Helice just days before a quake devastated the Greek city. More recently there have been reports of catfish moving violently, bees leaving their hive in a panic, and fish, rodents, wolves and snakes exhibiting strange behaviour before earthquakes [Nature]. While these anecdotes grab the imagination, the scatter-shot nature of earthquakes previously prevented anyone from documenting such animal behavior before, during, and after a quake.

But Grant did, and by sheer luck. Her team was studying common toads in Italy in April 2009 when the amphibians began to disappear from the study site. This didn’t make much sense to her, the toads abandoning a breeding site in the midst of breeding season. So the researchers tracked them. They found that 96 percent of males — who vastly outnumber females at breeding spots — abandoned the site, 46 miles (74 kilometers) from the quake’s epicenter, five days before it struck on April 6, 2009. The number of toads at the site fell to zero three days before the quake [Washington Post]. Grant says her initial reaction to the mass toad dispersal was annoyance—their flight was holding up her research. However, when they began to return the day after the earthquake, things began to make more sense.

Even in this study, where scientists happened to be in the right place at the right time to catalog this long-rumored animal activity, one can’t know for sure that seismic activity is the direct cause of the toads packing up and taking off. In an evolutionary sense, though, it seems logical: If the toads can pick up environmental clues that a quake is imminent they could flee to higher ground, someplace safer from rock falls and other hazards. Says Grant, “Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system” [BBC News].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / Gang65


What is Diesel Fuel?

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Diesel fuel is a very complex mixture of thousands of individual compounds with carbon numbers between 9 and 23 (number of carbon atoms per hydrocarbon molecule) Most of these compounds are members of the paraffinic, naphthenic or aromatic class of hydrocarbons (HC).

Classes and Properti

Obama Plan to End the Moratorium on Oil Exploration | The Intersection

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Today President Obama and Interior Secretary Salazar will announce plans to end the moratorium on oil exploration. An expanse for lease would become available from Delaware to central Florida and also include parts of the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea north of Alaska. From the NYTimes:
But while Mr. Obama has staked out middle ground on other environmental matters — supporting nuclear power, for example — the sheer breadth of the offshore drilling decision will take some of his supporters aback. And it is no sure thing that it will win support for a climate bill from undecided senators close to the oil industry, like Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, or Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. The Senate is expected to take up a climate bill in the next few weeks — the last chance to enact such legislation before midterm election concerns take over. Mr. Obama and his allies in the Senate have already made significant concessions on coal and nuclear power to try to win votes from Republicans and moderate Democrats. The new plan now grants one of the biggest items on the oil industry’s wish list — access to vast areas of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling.
My ...


Extra HDD For Graphics Apps.

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Hello,

I have a dell inspiron, I recently sent it back to dell to have a new motherboard put into it(under warranty). Before this we had tried a new hard drive a troubleshooting, and it didn't work. I do now have an extra hard drive. 500 gb scada, along with the 500 gb scada in the comput

More *incredible* Phobos imagery | Bad Astronomy

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I’ve already posted some beautiful closeups of Phobos, a moon of Mars, taken by the Mars Express space probe, after the European Space Agency aimed the spacecraft at the tiny moon. The closeups are beautiful, but now the ESA has posted a stunning full-body shot of Phobos:

phobos_hires

[As usual, click the pix to embiggen.]

The resolution is an amazing 9 meters (30 feet!) per pixel. Clearly, Phobos has been through a lot. Mars orbits near the inner edge of the asteroid belt, which may explain how battered its surface is. The grooves were once thought to be ripples from a big impact that created the whopping crater Stickney (not seen in this view, but you can see it really well here), but are now thought to be from boulders rolling around in the low gravity of the moon, perhaps ejected rocks from various impacts landing back down in the feeble gravity.

Note the one winding path going from the upper left to lower right: that looks very much like a boulder bounced its way across the surface! The curvy path is an indication of the changing gravity field of Phobos: it’s not a smooth sphere, but a lumpy potato, so the surface gravity — what you’d think of as "down" if you were standing there — changes greatly depending on position.

phobos_anaglyphThey also put together this stunning 3D anaglyph. You can really see the depth of the craters and grooves on the surface. Run, don’t walk, to get a pair of red/green glasses for this one! Phobos really pops out of the screen. The depth and clarity of the 3D is amazing!

This pass of the moon was designed to obtain as much scientific data as possible before the launch of the Russian mission called Phobos-Grunt, which will land on the moon and send a sample of its surface back to Earth for study. Phobos looks an awful lot like an asteroid itself, and its origin is still something of a mystery. More data like these — and obtaining a sample of its surface material! — may clear up its story once and for all.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)


Why We Talk Endlessly About NOTHING

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My discussion spans 10 letters with nothing but bragging and finding faults.

said earlier that a straight answer could suffice.

It was succinct to say ,to google to, a person who might have forgotten.

May be he/ she wanted engineering community to comment rather than Googl

Chilled Water Network

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Dear All,

Thanks for this interesting forum... hope to find a solution for my question below:

Does it exist international standards or handbooks for DCP buried pipes? like minimum cover, min distance between supply and return, min dimensions of valve chambers...

thanks a lot

When pain is pleasant | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Do-not-pressEver prodded at an injury despite the fact you know it will hurt? Ever cook an incredibly spicy dish even though you know your digestive tract will suffer for it? If the answers are yes, you’re not alone. Pain is ostensibly a negative thing but we’re often drawn to it. Why?

According to Marta Andreatta from the University of Wurzburg, it’s a question of timing. After we experience pain, the lack of it is a relief. Andreatta thinks that if something happens during this pleasurable window immediately after a burst of pain, we come to associate it with the positive experience of pain relief rather than the negative feeling of the pain itself. The catch is that we don’t realise this has happened. We believe that the event, which occurred so closely to a flash of pain, must be a negative one. But our reflexes betray us.

Andreatta’s work builds on previous research with flies and mice. If flies smell a distinctive aroma just before feeling an electric shock, they’ll learn to avoid that smell. However, if the smell is released immediately after the shock, they’re actually drawn to it. Rather than danger, the smell was linked with safety. The same trick works in mice. But what about humans?

To find out, Andreatta recruited 101 volunteers and split them into three groups, all of whom saw coloured shapes. The first group received a moderately painful electric shock six seconds before the shapes flashed up. The second group were shocked eight seconds after the shapes appeared and the third group were shocked fourteen seconds afterwards. This last time gap should have been long enough to stop the recruits from forming a link between shock and shape.

Later, everyone saw the shapes without any accompanying shocks. When asked to rate their feelings, most people felt negatively towards the shapes, particularly those who had been shocked just afterwards. That seems fairly predictable, but Andreatta wanted to find out what they really thought.

To do that, she flashed the shapes up again, paired them with a loud burst of noise, and measured how strongly they blinked in response. This is called the startle reflex; it’s an automatic response to fear or danger, and it’s very hard to fake. The strength of the blink reflects how fearful the recruits were feeling.

Shape_startleSure enough, those who saw the shapes before they were electrocuted showed a stronger startle reflex than usual. To them, the images meant that something bad was about to happen so when the noise went off, they reacted particularly strongly. But the recruits who were shocked before the shapes appeared actually showed a weaker startle reflex. It seems that despite their ratings, the lesson they had taken away was that the presence of the shapes was a positive omen.

Other studies have found that rewarding experiences can soothe the startle reflex – in flies, a sugary liquid works and in humans, news of a monetary windfall will do the trick. Andreatta thinks that some of her volunteers behaved in the same way because they had come to associate the coloured shapes with the rewarding feeling of pain relief.

For the moment, despite my introductory paragraph, it’s not immediately obvious how this relates to our daily lives. Andreatta suggests that the pleasant after-effects of otherwise scary or painful affairs might explain why we’re so drawn to dangerous or terrifying pursuits like rollercoaster rides or bungee jumping. More importantly, it could affect the way we think about mental disorders like addiction or anxiety.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0103

More on pain:

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Pocket In Pump Out Line?

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Is it acceptable to have pocket in pumps out (NNF) line to pump. The line is having 2" drain connected to drain system. If pocket is not accepatble then we need to elevate the equipment by another 2000 mm.

When sickliness is manlinessGene Expression

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ResearchBlogging.orgBelow I note that sex matters when it comes to evolution, specifically in the case of how sexual reproduction forces the bits of the genome to be passed back and forth across sexes. In fact, the origin of sex is arguably the most important evolutionary question after the origin of species, and it remains one of the most active areas of research in evolutionary genetics. More specifically the existence of males, who do not bear offspring themselves but seem to be transient gene carriers is a major conundrum. But that’s not the main issue in this post. Let’s take the existence of males as a given. How do sex differences play out in evolutionary terms shaping other phenotypes? Consider Bateman’s principle:

Bateman’s principle is the theory that females almost always invest more energy into producing offspring than males, and therefore in most species females are a limiting resource over which the other sex will compete.

Female ova are energetically more expensive, and scarcer, than male sperm. Additionally, in mammals and other live-bearing species the female invests more time and energy after the point of fertilization but before the young exhibit any modicum of organismic independence (the seahorse being the exception). And, often the female is the “primary caregiver” in the case of species where the offspring require more care after birth. The logic of Bateman’s principle is so obvious when its premises are stated that it easily leads to a proliferation of numerous inferences, and many data are “explained” by its operation (in Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species the biological anthroplogist Sarah Hrdy moots the complaint that the principle is applied rather too generously in the context of an important operationally monogamous primate, humans).

But the general behavioral point is rooted in realities of anatomy and life-history; in many dioecious species males and females exhibit a great deal of biological and behavioral dimorphism. But the direction and nature of dimorphism varies. Male gorillas and elephant seals are far larger than females of their kind, but among raptors females are larger. If evolution operated like Newtonian mechanics I assume we wouldn’t be theorizing about why species or sex existed at all, we’d all long ago have evolved toward perfectly adapted spherical cows floating in our own effluvium, a species which is a biosphere.

Going beyond what is skin deep, in humans it is often stated that males are less immunologically robust than females. Some argue that this is due to higher testosterone levels, which produce a weakened immune system. Amtoz Zahavi might argue that this is an illustration of the ‘handicap principle’. Only very robust males who are genetically superior can ‘afford’ the weakened immune system which high testosterone produces, in addition to the various secondary sexual characteristics beloved of film goers. Others would naturally suggest that male behavior is to blame. For example, perhaps males forage or wander about more, all the better to catch bugs, and they pay less attention to cleanliness.

But could there be a deeper evolutionary dynamic rooted in the differential behaviors implied from Bateman’s principle? A new paper in The Proceedings of the Royal Society explores this question with a mathematical model, The evolution of sex-specific immune defences:

Why do males and females often differ in their ability to cope with infection? Beyond physiological mechanisms, it has recently been proposed that life-history theory could explain immune differences from an adaptive point of view in relation to sex-specific reproductive strategies. However, a point often overlooked is that the benefits of immunity, and possibly the costs, depend not only on the host genotype but also on the presence and the phenotype of pathogens. To address this issue we developed an adaptive dynamic model that includes host–pathogen population dynamics and host sexual reproduction. Our model predicts that, although different reproductive strategies, following Bateman’s principle, are not enough to select for different levels of immunity, males and females respond differently to further changes in the characteristics of either sex. For example, if males are more exposed to infection than females (e.g. for behavioural reasons), it is possible to see them evolve lower immunocompetence than females. This and other counterintuitive results highlight the importance of ecological feedbacks in the evolution of immune defences. While this study focuses on sex-specific natural selection, it could easily be extended to include sexual selection and thus help to understand the interplay between the two processes.

The paper is Open Access, so you can read it for yourself. The formalism is heavy going, and the text makes it clear that they stuffed a lot of it into the supplements. You can basically “hum” through the formalism, but I thought I’d lay it out real quick, or at least major aspects.

This shows the birth rate of a given genotype contingent upon population density & proportions of males & females infected with a pathogen

graphic-1

These equations takes the first and nests them into an epidemiological framework which illustrates pathogen transmission (look at the first right hand term in the first two)

graphic-3

And these are the three models that they ran computations with

graph4

There are many symbols in those equations which aren’t obvious, and very difficult to keep track of. Here’s the table which shows what the symbols mean….

symboltable

If you really want to understand the methods and derivations, as well how the details of how they computae evolutionarily stable strategies, you’ll have to go into the supplements. Let’s just assume that their findings are valid based on their premises.

Note:

- They assume no sexual selection
- They assume unlimited male gametes, so total reproductive skew where one male fertilizes all females is possible
- Fecundity is inversely correlated with population density
- Total population growth is ultimately dependent on females, they are the “rate limiting” sex
- Total population growth is proportional to density
- There is no acquired immunity
- There is no evolution of the pathogen in this model

Basically the model is exploring a quantitative trait which exhibits characteristics in relation to resistance of acquiring the pathogen and tolerance of it once the pathogen is acquired. In terms of the “three models,” the first is one where there is resistance to the pathogen, individuals recover from infection and decrease pathogen fitness. The second is one of tolerance, individuals are infected, but may still reproduce while infected. Note that the ability to resist or tolerate infection has a trade off, reduced lifespan (consider some forms of malaria resistance). The third model shows the trade off of tolerance and resistance.

The “pay off” of the paper is that they show that the male evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), that is, a morph which can not be “invaded” by a mutation, may be one of reduced immune resistance in certain circumstances of high rates of infection. There is an exploration of varying rates of virulence, but there was no counterintuitive finding so I won’t cover that. In any case, here’s the figure:

graphresistence

The text is small, so to clarify:

1) The two panels on the top left are for model 1, and show variation in male and female recovery from infection left to right (resistance)

2) The two panels on the bottom left are for model 2, and show variation in male and female fecundity when infected left to right (tolerance)

3) The four panels on the right are for model 3, and show variation in recovery in the top two panels and fecundity in the bottom two, with male parameters varied on the left and female on the right

The vertical axis on all of the panels are male infection rate, the horizontal the female infection rate. Circled crosses (?) indicate regions (delimited by solid lines) where females evolve higher immunocompetence than males. The lighter shading indicates a higher value of the trait at ESS (recovery or fecundity). Note that the two top left panels show a peculiar pattern for males, the sort of counterintuitive finding which the model promises: when infection rates among males are very high their resistance levels drop. Why? The model is constructed so that resistance has a cost, and if they keep getting infected the cost is constant and there’s no benefit as they keep getting sick. In short it is better to breed actively for a short time and die than attempt to fight a losing battle against infection (I can think of possible explanations of behavior and biological resistance in high disease human societies right now). It is at medium levels of infection rates that males develop strong immune systems so that they recover. The bottom right portion of panel which shows variation in male resistance illustrates a trend where high female infection results in reduced immune state in males. Why? The argument is simple; female population drops due to disease result in a massive overall population drop and the epidemiological model is such that lower densities hinder pathogen transmission. So the cost for resistance becomes higher than the upside toward short-term promiscuous breeding in hopes of not catching the disease. Another point that is notable from the panels is that males seem to be more sensitive to variation in infection rates. This makes sense insofar as males exhibit a higher potential variance in reproductive outcomes because of the difference in behavior baked into the model (males have higher intrasexual competition).

One can say much more, as is said in the paper. Since you can read it yourself, I commend you to do so if you are curious. Rather, I would like a step back and ask: what does this “prove?” It does not prove anything, rather, this is a model with many assumptions which still manages to be quite gnarly on a first run through. It is though suggestive in joint consideration with empirical trends which have long been observed. Those empirical trends emerge out of particular dynamics and background parameters, and models can help us formalize and project abstractly around real concrete biological problems. The authors admit their model is simple, but they also assert that they’ve added layers of complexity which is necessary to understand the dynamics in the real world with any level of clarity. In the future they promise to add sexual selection, which I suspect will make a much bigger splash than this.

I’ll let them finish. From their conclusion:

We assessed the selective pressures on a subset of sex-specific traits (recovery rate, reproductive success during infection and lifespan) caused by arbitrary differences between males and females in infection rate or virulence (i.e. disease-induced death rate). In so doing, we covered a range of scenarios whereby sex-specific reproductive traits such as hormones and behaviour could plausibly affect the exposure to infection…r the severity of disease…First, we showed that changes in the traits of either sex affect the selective pressures on both sexes, either in the same or in opposite directions, depending on the ecological feedbacks. For example, an increase in male susceptibility (or exposure) to infection favours the spread of the pathogen in the whole population and therefore tends to select for higher resistance or tolerance in both sexes if the cost of immunity is constitutive. However, above a certain level of exposure, the benefit of rapid recovery in males decreases owing to constant reinfection (we assume no acquired immunity). This selects for lower resistance in males, ultimately leading to the counterintuitive situation where males with higher susceptibility or exposure to infection than females evolve lower immunocompetence…A similar pattern arises if the cost of immunity is facultative, in the form of a trade-off between rate of recovery and relative fecundity during infection (model (iii)): if males happen to be more susceptible (or exposed) to infection than females, they are predicted to evolve a longer infectious period balanced by higher sexual activity during infection than females.

Restif, O., & Amos, W. (2010). The evolution of sex-specific immune defences Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0188

Ignition Timing Advice

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I have a KKSB solenoid switch in my truck used for advancing the ignition timing of engine during cold start.

This switch goes OFF once the desired engine temperature is achieved.

Will the fuel economy of the vehicle increase or decrease if KKSB switch is kept continuously ON deliberat

Worldwide Solar Energy

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Has anyone explored the idea of a world network of solar power energy? What I envision is for all countries to have their country produce all their electricity from solar energy. Then, all countries connect their grid to their neighbors. When it gets dark in one country, they could get energy from t