aving discussed the subject with half a dozen people over the past week or so, it seems clear that the threat of radiation is underplayed by companies that make business out of it (X-ray for the most part, if not nuclear energy too). The crux of the argument is that, just as people are increasingly not allowed to smoke in pubs due to people who work there (not always out of choice), in places where radiation is abundant, e.g. scanning facilities in hospitals and airports, people’s right to deny and avoid exposure to radiation should be respected. In companies where CT scanners are tested, even software developers are required to be exposed to radiation (my siblings) and sign a sort of waiver that removes liability. In more and more airports not only suitcases are subjected to X-ray treatment but humans too; they are not even given alternative options, except not work (in the former case) or not fly (in the latter case). The attitude ought to change. As someone with doctoral qualifications in the area of medical imaging, I occasionally try to raise the issue (not confront) those who are victim of this status quo (e.g. hospital workers who spend hours in particular rooms and particular airport staff standing adjacent to high-power scanners), but it is not easy to reach a solution which does not leave both sides with relative discomfort.

The solution one might propose here is a legal requirement for companies to bear full liability in case staff develops cancer (tumours that can be shown to have their causality within the workplace) and people who enter X-ray scanners should be both advised/alerted and also require to sign a form of waiver in case an X-ray-free gate is not made available at an airport (like in Manchester Airport). It is bad enough that the problems with cellphones are de-emphasised; here we talk about modalities whose effect is orders of magnitude higher and in late 2009 a study was published in a respected journal having managed to show the correlation between CT and cancer to be far greater than previously stated, possibly in industry-funded studies.

The GE-owned MSNBC used to tell us how wonderful and safe nuclear energy was. That was before the GE-designed Fukushima facility suffered a disaster that would probably kill hundreds of thousands, over time, with agony.

People used to think smoking was harmless. People used to smoke in places where non-smokers were the majority. Why is radiation still treated differently?

am well past my prime time (shown in the linked post is 2005, even though the prime was around 2002 when I was 20), but while I’m still in my 20s I manage to find time to do exercise, currently with a folding keyboard and a PDA on my lap (between sets). The above photo is days old and it is totally unedited (taken with an iPhone). Since I never took illegal substances like steroids it might not impress those who are accustomed to seeing so-called ‘body builders’ (where the name of the game is consuming as much/many steroids as humanly possible before passing out or passing away). Anyway, the above was the first time in 6 years that I took photos of myself flexing muscles and it may be the last time before I’m in my 30s. I will never exceed in terms of strength or stamina what I reached at age 20 not just because of physical limitations that accompany ageing but also the excess amount of time spent on the computer and other activities. Diet too has gotten a lot worse, but there will always be the memories.

Direct download as Ogg (1:12:32, 15.3 MB) | High-quality MP3 (27.4 MB) | Low-quality MP3 (8.3 MB)

Summary: A reasonably short episode covering Torvalds’ GNOME remarks and various other bits of news

LAST NIGHT we returned to recording after almost two weeks off. We caught up with some news about desktop environments and other such GNU/Linux-oriented topics.

The show includes “Sorry, Baby” by Dan Dyer and “Paganini: Cantabile” by Volodja Balzalorsky, which closes the show. We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

As embedded (HTML5):

Read the rest of this entry »

FTER this year’s time off the Internet (and more time under the sun) I am eager to catch up with the news I missed, but there does not seem to be much of it. SUSE signed a deal with Microsoft just before I took time off and apart from that no major disaster has occurred.

T SOME point once a year, usually in July, I take a long break from the computer and the Internet (that’s my main machine at the top). In the coming week and a half I will be travelling outdoors, meeting friends, and working inside the lab where the Internet connection is not crucial (in fact, it is providing distractions in many ways).

I will be back in August and until then I will go online only to remove spam and ensure everything is up and running.

Direct download as Ogg (1:55:44, 25.7 MB) | High-quality MP3 (42.2 MB) | Low-quality MP3 (13.2 MB)

Summary: Michael Glasser, Tim, and Roy have a discussion about GNU/Linux and Mac OS X

TODAY’s show touches on a few bits of news but mostly focuses on comparisons between Apple’s operating systems and Linux-based operating systems. The guest in this episode is the Prescott Computer Guy, Michael Glasser, who advocates Apple products.

Except for the theme song at the end, the show include the self-named track by Takashi Kamide and “When You Are Near” by Warren Hood. We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

As embedded (HTML5):

Read the rest of this entry »

t various stages throughout my career (I am 29 now), myself and others pondered starting a blog about Open Access, Open Data or open research (opening one’s lab, including data, methods, etc.), but since I already spend more time than I can afford advocating GNU/Linux, I ended up spending a lot of my energy fighting against software patents. This is one aspect among several involving the sharing and transparency of the sciences. There is of course also a dimension associated with copyrights and despite its importance I no longer have time to pursue the issue; many people already do so anyway. To put the core argument succinctly, nowadays when we have the Internet and we have a presentation layer such as the World Wide Web (for exchange of inter-connected rich media), we no longer depend on many analogue technologies and the notion of scarcity must cope and catch up with what’s available. To expect people to publish their findings only in paper form with pagination is to pretend that we are locked into legacy, which we should not. Computer Vision is considerably limited by paper. There are much better and faster ways of getting messages across, especially in this age of information overload. Moreover, travelling for presentation to a crowd (conference) is less necessary now that many people’s Internet connections permit video streaming at a good resolution. Romanticising over the nostalgia which is 20^th century-esque research is no longer beneficial as it leads to inheriting inherent limitations. I was reminded of this in an IRC conversation last night. It was agreed upon that the theory about publishers exploiting academics to write, review and even edit entire publications for the publishers to profit from at the expense of those academics is something that needs to be stopped. Many academics these days have their own homepages and sometimes their blogs too. They can publish a lot of material there and let the quality/accuracy be determined by citation, e.g. something like the PageRank system which merely inherits the ideas of algorithms before its time (take away Google’s/Stanford’s patent while at it). The issue of course is that people cannot reference papers by Internet addresses, at least not by conventional means. The idea that papers should be accessible through libraries though is outdated as libraries too are going somewhat extinct and the speed of working there is inferior. Other than self pride and honour from peers, what incentive is there really to being heavily involved in the publication industry which benefits publishers and offers writers not so much exposure anymore? Fewer people seem to be searching journals; they use external search engines or Wikipedia instead (it’s multi-lingual). The debate becomes ever more relevant now that Aaron Schwartz is being hounded for just doing his job.

Eventually, prices will converge somewhere around zero not because academic work is worthless but because people’s goal is to share and disseminate their ideas, not to serve someone else’s paywall. The real worth of research is derived from its reach, not its scarcity.