Blog archives for December, 2005

Scientific discoveries of the week

A whole bunch of interesting science news this Christmas-before-New Year week, so apparently some of us are still working. First from the University of California, San Francisco, research clarifies how brain replenishes memory-making molecules, where they figured out how the brain allocates more molecules to accommodate for more memory. A human RAM upgrade takes place in the following manner:

The scientists sought to answer this question by studying the basal trafficking of receptors — the normal process by which receptors are replaced from fresh stores that are synthesized and located inside the cell. Focusing on live neurons cultured from rats, they discovered clear evidence to dispel the prevailing view that receptors at the synapse are constantly being replaced by stores inside the cell. Rather, the scientists found that the synaptic receptors are relatively stable, lasting about 16 hours before they are replaced. The study also supports an unsuspected route by which new receptors make their way to the synapse: Fresh AMPA receptors appear to be placed on the cell surface at the cell body and then migrate along the arms or dendrites of the cell to synapses, rather than moving within the cell to the synapse as had been thought.

Over at UCLA in Southern California they developed a new imaging technology that incorporates an implantable chip:

A collaboration among scientists at UCLA, the California Institute of Technology, Stanford, Siemens and Fluidigm has developed a new technology using integrated microfluidic chips for simplifying, lowering the cost and diversifying the types of molecules used to image the biology of disease with the medical imaging technology, positron emission tomography (PET). These molecules are used with PET to search diagnostically throughout the body to look for, or image, the molecular errors of disease and to guide the development of new molecular therapeutics.

Finally, MIT proved this week that brain cells do grow:

While scientists have focused mostly on trying to regenerate the long axons damaged in spinal cord injuries, the new finding suggests targeting a different part of the cell: the dendrite. “Dendrite,” from the Greek word for tree, is a branched projection of a nerve cell that conducts electrical stimulation to the cell body. “We do see relatively large-scale growth” in the dendrites, Nedivi said. “Maybe we would get some level of improvement (in spinal cord patients) by embracing dendritic growth.” The growth is affected by use, meaning the more the neurons are used, the more likely they are to grow, she said.

Trip to SeaWorld San Diego

SeaWorld San Diego is all about watching shows and getting wet. That might not have been a good idea on early December morning, as even in this southern city it was quite chilly and foggy, but going to a place called SeaWorld what do you expect. By itself the SeaWorld in San Diego is not too big, but if you manage to spend your time between the shows and walking around, you will definitely have a handful for a day.

Almost everybody has heard of Shamu, the killer whale family that found a place to live at SeaWorld. These unevenly colored black-and-white mammals (the coloring tricks the predators) surround large schools of fish and then use their tails for killing large quantities of them. With this disposition it’s quite amazing they are trainable to perform tricks and behave in a very cute manner. There are three Shamu shows running at San Diego SeaWorld daily, and this is generally a must.

The dolphin show is well orchestrated and fun to visit as well. They run more frequently, and involve quite a lot of splashing as well. If you’re planning to get good photos from SeaWorld and remain dry at the same time, it’s virtually impossible. However, if you still set your mind on it, bring your own waterproof ponchos, as the ones with SeaWorld San Diego logo go for $6.

The Pets Rule show surely excited the kids in the audience, and by itself was pretty interesting to watch as well - trained dogs, cats, pigeons and even pigs do all sorts of tricks and compete in animal Olympics.

Penguin colony and shark tank are also great to visit, but the pictures didn’t turn out too great. The sea lion show is quite fun, too, but since they have just two lions, it has more story than trained animals.

TradeKing launches with $4.95 trades

TradeKing is launched today, a new venture of Donato A. Montanaro of SureTrade fame. Their claim to the market dominated largely by $7 Scottrade? Cheaper trades. Their 7% margin trades are also pretty low, but if you’re into that, you can get a better deal on margin trading. There are certain fees like stop check payment fee and IRA transfer fees, but overall looks like a pretty solid proposition without minimum trading and minimum balance requirements.

I guess one could call them a Web 2.0 stock trader (hey, Richard, this one might be interesting to you), as they offer a blog, an RSS aggregator and tagging on their site as well. The blogs are pretty heavy on finance and stock recommendations, but I guess boosting their financial service with content offering generated mostly by users wouldn’t hurt - there’s much to be said about creating a community of finance-savvy individuals, as Fool.com experience proves.

CNN/Money runs an article on TradeKing today:

Montanaro said the $4.95 fee, which is considerably less than the $7 to $10 charged by some competitors, is made possible by using technology to reduce costs. He claimed that TradeKing’s competitors were stuck trying to cobble together old technology from a variety of sites as the industry has consolidated over the years.

Trip to San Diego Wild Animal Park

San Diego Wild Animal Park is located 35 miles north of downtown San Diego on 1,800 acres (that’s 7 sq. km.), and as of 2005, is hosting more than 400 species of animals and more than 3,500 species of plants.

We took a train ride that is free with general admission, and takes you around the park, presenting a spectacular view of the park’s property.

The train ride goes all around the park, and provides a good overview of places worth visiting. Such as this elephant compound:

Rhinoceri felt quite relaxed that day:

They have a pretty agile family of gorillas that certainly enjoy a company of on-lookers that keep taking pictures. We saw gorillas having lunch while we were observing them. Apparently green peppers was the vegetable of the day.

The balloon ride costs $15 a person and takes you 400 feet above the park property for about 5 minutes. It provides a pretty nice scenic view of the area around Wild Animal Park.

The Wild Animal Park provides a spot that’s pretty close to giraffes’ feeding spot.

The male lion was on a loan from San Diego Zoo that day. However, that wasn’t much of entertainment, since the male mainly slept in the warm grass.

Yahoo! hosting adds WordPress as well

Both Movable Type and WordPress are now available on Yahoo! Small Business hosting accounts.
Yahoo! Web Hosting with Movable Type and Wordpress

WordPress Dev Blog points out one important factor to consider: Yahoo! Hosting admins will automatically upgrade the WordPress installs when a new version comes out.

Running apps off USB drive

Why running applications off USB flash drive is a bad idea.

HSBC Direct gets into online savings with 4.25% APY

Online savings game just got a little bit more competitive. HSBC, the world’s local bank, and one of the largest banking institutions in the world, is offering 4.25% APY with minimum balance of $1 and $25 bonus to open a new account at HSBC Direct. With long time leader ING Direct currently at 3.75% APY and Emigrant Direct at 4.0% APY, HSBC offering looks very competitive, considering the fact that one can fund the account from another online savings account, allowing the money from ING Direct and Emigrant Direct to flow freely into HSBC. GMAC Bank, at the same time, advertises 4.30% APY for its FDIC-insured money market account, but the site seems to break with “Your request could not be processed” on the last stage of the signup.

Update: HSBC promotional code ccs15 also works for $25.

Debugging PHP

Some PHP reading for the day - Debugging techniques for PHP programmers:

This article details various methods for debugging PHP applications, including turning on error reporting in Apache and PHP, and by placing strategic print statements to locate the source of more difficult bugs through a simple example PHP script. The PHPEclipse plug-in for Eclipse, a slick development environment with real-time syntax parsing abilities, will also be covered, as well as the DBG debugger extension for PHPEclipse.

Russians, Scottish, Hungarians

Millionaire next doorI am listening to Millionaire Next Door on my daily commute, courtesy of Sunnyvale public library, which carries a decent selection of audio books. They list a popular myth of most of the US millionaires belonging to the English descent aand Mayflower dynasty. While in fact, ranking US millionaires by ethnic origin seems to produce a list led by Russians, Scottish and Hungarians. All first generation, since, as they show later in the book, the next generations tend to squander the money.

Alexa WebSearch launches

The Alexa WebSearch Platform announcement (everybody kees pointing here, but I just happened to read about it on Wall Street Journal late at night) is one of those deals that might cause the next revolution in the field of Web search, or might turn out to be not a big deal at all. Om Malik apparently thinks it’s a big deal, and Phil Wainewright doesn’t think it will be.Alexa WebSearch

Historically all components of the search engine

  • index
  • ranking algorithms
  • interface to present results

has been controlled by the search engines themselves, where index was used for bragging rights, ranking algorithms defined the search engine efficiency and usefulness for the user, and interface was a way to serve nice ads to pay the bills.

Which all made it really hard to build a really good search engine. First you had to come up with idea of efficiently spidering millions of Web sites out there, then it was the time for the trip to the store to get more hard drives, then it was the matter of deciding what goes and what doesn’t go into the index, then the database server for this huge chunk of data had to be built, then the power bill arrived… That’s why there’s a bunch of startups building blogging tools and streaming wiki via api mashups, but not a whole lot building yet another search engine. Since even if something decent is build, it gets hard to scale it.

Alexa, it seems, wants to commoditize the index and build an open corpus out of crawled Web sites. Computer scientists enjoy having large collections of texts available to them, since it encourages a whole bunch of projects that are interesting, like how many times a phrase you know is used in everyday English language. When I was in grad school (old fart alert!) all we had access to was Reuters Corpus and similar others, but nothing to the extend of 100 TB that Alexa is offering today. One can simply SSH into a server and start compiling the code with gcc. For academia the WebSearch platform will be a pretty good playground to experiment with.

In targeting commercial developers Alexa would have to put in some more effort. Current problems with starting a startup that’s built upon WebSearch platform include:

  • relatively small index, compared to what Google, Yahoo! and others have to offer. That is, if you’re building a search pure-play on top of Alexa, you already lost the competition
  • lack of information about frequency of updates - can I build a blog search, for example, that would refresh certain sites in the index several times a day?
  • once the project becomes popular, it’s not clear how well it can scale on Alexa-managed back-end. They will probably add more boxes, if paying customers ask them, but where exactly you will be on their priority list remains to be seen

Nevertheless, the API is pretty interesting and deserves some time. However, the only early commercial applications that I can see arriving in a short time frame is Alexa-based content generators for spam blogs and keyword-stuffed Web sites displaying contextual ads of a third-party network.

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