A meeting of the San Diego Software Industry Council. The subject: What will Web 3.0 look like?
“Why don’t we know?” asked one venture capitalist. “Are we idiots?”
The VC was pandering to an in-group audience. The implied answer was, No, we’re not idiots, we are successful, sophisticated investors, entrepreneurs, and scholars of the web!
But y’know what? The truth is, yes, we are idiots. We are idiots because of technology colonization, and we fall for it every time.
Fifteen years ago the World Wide Web came along, and what did we do with it? We used it for push-publishing, for banner ads, and to sell stuff from web storefronts. In other words, we treated the WWW like an electronic magazine, or another television channel.
AIDS researchers have for the first time demonstrated that human blood stem cells can be engineered into cells that can target and kill HIV-infected cells — a process that potentially could be used against a range of chronic viral diseases. The study, published today in PLoS ONE, demonstrates that human stem cells can be engineered into the equivalent of a genetic vaccine.
By Taking CD8 cytotoxic T lymphocytes — the "killer" T cells that help fight infection — from an HIV-infected individual, the researchers identified the molecule known as the T-cell receptor, which guides the T cell in recognizing and killing HIV-infected cells.
A political scientist from the University of Alberta has uncovered a dastardly ploy by the producers of Thomas and Friends, a popular children's TV show, to turn their innocent audience of youngsters into socially intolerant conservatives.
After analyzing 23 episodes of Thomas and Friends, a show about a train, his friends and their adventures on a fictional island, political scientist Shauna Wilton was able to identify themes that she believes are incompatible with the egalitarian world society her and her social scientist friends are planning for our children.
In a recent Journal of the National Cancer Institute editorial, doctors expressed concern over the media's coverage of oncology research, citing examples of exaggerated fears, hopes, and a general lack of skepticism in the reporting.
The editorial points, for example, to the misleading coverage of a New England Journal of Medicine study that documented the trial results of the new anti-cancer drug olaparib. One national news outlet claimed the drug "was the most important cancer breakthrough of the decade," but failed to note that the study was uncontrolled (so there is no way to know if the drug accounted for the findings), and very preliminary (it is not known if the findings will ever translate into longer life).
