teficsa.com

Friday, March 11, 2005Many infertile American women would choose the sex of their next child if given the option.

A survey of 561 women being treated for infertility has found that 41% would use sex selection if it were offered at no cost.

Contradicting fears that such sex selection would cause gender imbalance, the survey found that women with no children would choose baby girls and boys in approximately equal numbers.

Furthermore, women with only daughters wanted to select a male child while women with only sons wanted to select a female child.

“Sex selection is a topic that’s almost taboo for physicians to talk about,” says study lead author Tarun Jain of the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Prior to this study, there has been no data to indicate what the demand might be.”

Of 561 survey respondents, 229 would want to select the sex of their future child.

Among these, 45% had no children and 48% had children of all the same sex.

Half would choose to select the sex of their next child even if they had to bear the cost.

About 55% would choose sperm separation, 41% would choose preimplantation genetic diagnosis and 4% would choose neither.

Sex selection is controversial. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposes it for nonmedical reasons and so does the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics.

The American Society of Reproductive Medicine supports it for nonmedical reasons for family gender balancing provided methods used are safe and effective.

“As the techniques gain more popularity, physicians will have to decide if they will offer the procedure to patients with and without children,” says Jain.

The research is reported in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

Friday, January 5, 2007

An ethical controversy has surged in the United States and elsewhere around nine-year-old Ashley X (her family name has not been released). The disabled girl was operated upon at the request of her parents, to prevent her from growing, menstruating and developing breasts. The parents, who wish to remain anonymous, explain their situation on a blog entitled The “Ashley Treatment”. There have been over 1000 reactions on the blog so far.

Ashley suffers a condition termed static encephalopathy with marked global developmental deficits of unknown etiology, which means brain damage of unknown cause leading to a kind of static condition. She can make sounds, move her arms and kick her legs, but she cannot change her position, eat, walk, talk etc. Many of these children are in poor health and die young, but Ashley is in good health. For all of these functions she depends on her caregivers. Most of the day she passes watching her surrounding, lying on a pillow. Her parents call her their “Pillow Angel”, “since she is so sweet and stays right where we place her—usually on a pillow.”

Ashley’s parents want to keep her at home and care for her themselves, and they want to guarantee their daughter’s quality of life. To this end, they say, Ashley underwent several surgical procedures and medical treatments during a period of three years. To attenuate her growth, Ashley was given high doses of the hormone estrogen. Ashley now measures 4ft 5 (1m 35cm) and weighs around 75 lbs (34 kg), which is below her expected length and weight. Her low body weight and size would improve her comfort, and at the same time facilitate the work of her caregivers.

Surgery to remove her uterus (a procedure called a hysterectomy) and breast buds were performed, so Ashley does not menstruate and will not develop breasts, both of which parents think only would cause her discomfort. Since high estrogen levels can cause menstrual bleeding and breast development, the surgery was also meant to limit these effects. She also underwent surgery to remove her appendix, because it would be difficult to diagnose appendicitis given Ashley’s low communication possibilities.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Four people, including Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN) journalist Roberto Bruce Pruzzo, are confirmed dead after a Chilean military plane crashed near the Robinson Crusoe Island of the Juan Fernández Archipelago on Friday. Twenty-one people were aboard, with such figures as prominent Chilean television presenter and co-host of breakfast programme Buenos Días a Todos (Good Morning Everyone) Felipe Camiroaga Fernández, and businessman and founder of the Desafío: Levantemos Chile (Challenge: Let’s Bring Chile Up) project Felipe Cubillos.

The accident involved a CASA C-212 Aviocar aircraft. Minister of Defence Andrés Allamand said on Televisión Nacional the crash “occurred in the late [Friday] afternoon near the remote Juan Fernández archipelago. […] The scenario which we are facing is particularly adverse.” The plane tried twice tried to land at the Robinson Crusoe Island aerodrome before going missing. The Defence Ministry sent a frigate with a specialized rescue helicopter, and an aircraft to the crash site to help search for survivors on early Saturday.

Mayor of Juan Fernández Mr. Leopoldo González Charpentier reported conditions were “rough and windy,” and “aviation authorities lost communication with the plane as it approached the islands.” “We assume that there was an accident and that there are no survivors. […] Clothing, passengers’ suitcases and some sandals have been found in waters about one kilometre [0.6 mile] from the islands’ landing strip,” González stated.

“I empathise with the anguish and uncertainty the relatives the 21 passengers aboard the plane, which is presumed to have gone down, are living through at this moment. This is a very hard blow for our country,” President of Chile Sebastián Piñera said on Friday night after an emergency meeting. A TVN executive said: “We are extremely upset.”

A group of five people from Televisión Nacional de Chile‘s breakfast programme Buenos Días a Todos, including popular presenter Felipe Camiroaga, journalist Roberto Bruce, a cameraman and two producers, were travelling to the islands to film a report on the reconstruction efforts after the tsunami generated by the Chilean earthquake of February 2010 devastated Juan Fernández. Felipe Cubillos, from the Desafío Levantemos Chile project, which he founded and whose goal was to help reconstruct Chilean damaged towns after the earthquake, tweeted shortly before the plane took off from Santiago at 14:00 (17:00 UTC): “Travelling now to Juan Fernández Island with the support of our Air Force. We continue to work helping the island’s people.”

Felipe Camiroaga, 44, was born in Santiago, and began his television career in 1988 as producer of teen program Extra Jóvenes in Chilevisión; in 1992, he joined Televisión Nacional de Chile, working as co-host of Buenos Días a Todos with Jorge Hevia and Tati Penna, and in soap operas. Fourteen years later, in 2006, he began working as host on a talk show called Animal Nocturno (Nocturnal Animal), where he interviewed people such as former President Michelle Bachelet and former Miss Universe Cecilia Bolocco; between 2009 and 2010, he co-presented with Soledad Onetto the annual Viña del Mar International Song Festival. In July, and coincidentally, Camiroaga quoted Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas, following his death: “From the air I am, like every mortal, from the great and terrible flight, and I’m here to step to the stars.” The quote is reported of being “very inspirational” to Camiroaga. Camiroaga also created popular fictional characters such as Luciano Bello, a TV presenter from Maracaibo, Venezuela, and El Washington, a poor person from the streets of Santiago. Camiroaga was nicknamed “the Falcon of Chicureo” (El Halcón de Chicureo), because he raised several falcons in his hacienda in Chicureo, Santiago Metropolitan Region.

Hundreds of Chileans gathered outside Televisión Nacional de Chile headquarters in Santiago shortly after the station reported the tragedy; people prayed and lit candles outside TVN’s gates for the lives of Camiroaga and the rest of TVN’s involved staff.

On Saturday, Chilean newspaper Las Últimas Noticias (The Last News) put on its front page a headline saying “The last flight of the Falcon” (“El último vuelo del Halcón”) which generated controversy as Camiroaga had not been declared legally dead. The newspaper shortly changed the front page on its online version, however, the print edition continued to show the controversial headline.

Four bodies were found on Saturday morning by local fishermen who are helping in the rescue; they were taken from the islands to Santiago’s Medical Legal Service (Instituto Médico Legal) for identification, arriving 19:10 local time (22:10 UTC) at the El Bosque Air Force Base. Their identities were made public at 21:30 local time (00:30 UTC) by the Minister of the Government General Secretary Andrés Chadwick: Erwin Núñez, from the Chilean air force crew; Galia Díaz, from the National Council of Culture; Roberto Bruce, journalist of TVN’s Buenos Días a Todos; and Silvia Slier, editor of Buenos Días….

An intact door, several knapsacks, including one belonging to Felipe Camiroaga, and some equipment, lead the local mayor to assume “it was clear the plane crashed.” Local councillor Felipe Paredes told Chilean media, “[t]hese persons came [to Juan Fernández] in one of the most tragic moments in my life. I lost many people of our community, many loved people, because of the [February 2010] tsunami, and they reached me out sincerely. […] I can’t wait for them to be here.” Paredes was the last person to see the airplane in-flight, since he was in a control tower in the Robinson Crusoe Aerodrome.

Defence Minister Andres Allamand said in a press conference on Saturday night that “everyone died instantly when the crash happened.” He added that, “[b]ased on observations and the search we carried out with the Air Force commander, we have reached the conclusion that the impact was such that it should have resulted in the instantaneous death of all of those who were aboard the aircraft.” “We have peace of mind that Felipe [Camiroaga] died in a place he loved,” TVN executive Mauro Valdés told El Mercurio.

Televisión Nacional released a statement on Facebook on Saturday night: “We profoundly lament to have to confirm that according to official informations given by the authorities, there are no survivors from the Casa C212 airplane that crashed in the Juan Fernández archipelago on Friday 2 September evening. Within the list of deceased passengers, there are five persons from TVN’s program Buenos Días a Todos, which has caused deep sorrow in the whole family of TVN.”

On Sunday morning, a televised mass was conducted in TVN’s headquarters; some of the attendants were former Camiroaga’s girlfriend Katherine Salozny, long-time friend Raquel Argandoña, Megavisión presenter Kike Morandé, actor Álvaro Rudolphy, TV host and producer Guillermo Muñoz, and executives from TVN. Mauricio Correa, executive director of Buenos Días a Todos said during the mass “Our colleagues died complying a mission, the public television one, the same one that sometimes isn’t understood, but that is right there.” Kike Morandé said: “The best one died, Felipe [Camiroaga].”

“Felipe [Camiroaga] was a host on the national show [Buenos Días a Todos] I was on today, playing soccer with [him] too … it’s news right now that he was in a plane crash … please pray for him […]”, Nick Vujicic, who was interviewed on Friday morning in Buenos Días a Todos by Camiroaga himself, said on Facebook. Latin celebrities such as Luis Fonsi, Rocío Marengo, Lucero, Alejandro Sanz, Residente Calle 13, and Pope Benedict XVI sent condolences to Camiroaga’s and the other twenty people’s families, TVN reported.

President Sebastián Piñera decreed two days of national mourning, on Sunday afternoon in nationwide address. “The Government has decided to decree national mourning for the days of Monday and Tuesday of the forthcoming week, as a way to express solidarity with the families of the victims, and also the pain that has arisen throughout our country,” Piñera said. He also said that “work is being done with the best technology to find the bodies of the victims,” but added that he can’t “guarantee that the search will be successful in a 100 per cent. […] We know the impact was very violent and the airframe dispersed in a wide area.” Piñera said that the causes of the accident are unknown at the moment, and added that weather conditions affected negatively the security of the airplane landing.

The body of Erwin Núñez, from the Chilean air force crew, was taken to Antofagasta after a mass was performed in Santiago in his honour on Sunday. That same day, Roberto Bruce, one of the two TVN journalists and father of two, was cremated and interrated in Parque del Recuerdo Cemetery in Santiago. “With tremendous pain we have just said goodbye to Roberto, our beloved fat [person],” TVN journalist and presenter Karen Doggenweiler said on Twitter.

One minute of silence was held at the beginning of the football match between Chile and Mexico in Barcelona, on Sunday. On that same day, three books of condolences were set up outside TVN’s headquarters.

General Maximiliano Larraechea said that “at the moment there are no news on the search,” as of Sunday 17:00 local time (20:00 UTC). However, at 18:15 local time (21:15 UTC) approximately, Commander in Chief of the Chilean Air Force Jorge Rojas told Chilevisión that mutilated bodies were found in the water; Defence Minister Allamand confirmed that the recovered bodies will be taken to the Medical Legal Service in Santiago, in order to identify them, at 18:50 local time (21:50 UTC). Allamand added that “there are fears that not all bodies will be found,” and that the plane “was disintegrated on impact with the water.”

Chilevisión reported that at least three more people, including TVN actor Francisco Reyes, and singer Keko Yunge, were originally going to travel to Juan Fernández on Friday. Reyes, however, was told to not travel because “there was no room for him” by Buenos Días a Todos producer Carolina Gatica (who remains disappeared); Reyes was going to travel because he wanted to teach Juan Fernández children “acting techniques.” Yunge, member of the Desafío: Levantemos Chile group, was asked by Felipe Cubillos to not travel, because he wanted Yunge to complete a song he was working on. “It is incredible,” Yunge told Chilevisión.

The airplane crash, according to El Mercurio, is the worst involving a military plane since December 1982 when a Fokker F-27 twin-engine travelling from Santiago to Antofagasta crashed near La Serena, killing 46 people, including journalist Silvia Pinto.

From Televisión Nacional de Chile

• Carolina Gatica — Producer of Buenos Días a Todos
• Felipe Camiroaga — Presenter of Buenos Días a Todos
• Roberto Bruce — Journalist of Buenos Días a Todos; death confirmed by Minister Andrés Chadwick on Saturday 21:30 local time (Sunday 00:30 UTC)
• Sylvia Slier — Journalist, and editor of Buenos Días a Todos; death confirmed by Minister Chadwick
• Rodrigo Cabezón de Amesti — Cameraman

From Desafío Levantemos Chile

• Felipe Cubillos — Businessman
• Sebastian Correa
• Joel Lizama
• Catalina Vela
• Jorge Palma
• Joaquín Arnolds

From the National Council of Culture and the Arts

• Galia Díaz — Death confirmed by Minister Chadwick
• Romina Irarrázabal

From the Fuerza Aérea de Chile (Chilean air force)

• José Cifuentes — Journalist
• Commander Rodrigo Fernández

Crew

• Lieutenant Carolina Fernández
• Lieutenant Juan Pablo Mallea — Pilot of the plane
• First Sergeant Eduardo Jones
• First Corporal Eduardo Estrada
• First Corporal Erwin Núñez — Death confirmed by Minister Chadwick
• Second Corporal Flavio Olivo

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Stardust is a NASA space capsule that collected samples from comet 81P/Wild (also known as “Wild 2) in deep space and landed back on Earth on January 15, 2006. It was decided that a collaborative online review process would be used to “discover” the microscopically small samples the capsule collected. The project is called Stardust@home. Unlike distributed computing projects like SETI@home, Stardust@home relies entirely on human intelligence.

Andrew Westphal is the director of Stardust@home. Wikinews interviewed him for May’s Interview of the Month (IOTM) on May 18, 2006. As always, the interview was conducted on IRC, with multiple people asking questions.

Some may not know exactly what Stardust or Stardust@home is. Can you explain more about it for us?

Stardust is a NASA Discovery mission that was launched in 1999. It is really two missions in one. The primary science goal of the mission was to collect a sample from a known primitive solar-system body, a comet called Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt-two” — the discoverer was German, I believe). This is the first [US]] “sample return” mission since Apollo, and the first ever from beyond the moon. This gives a little context. By “sample return” of course I mean a mission that brings back extraterrestrial material. I should have said above that this is the first “solid” sample return mission — Genesis brought back a sample from the Sun almost two years ago, but Stardust is also bringing back the first solid samples from the local interstellar medium — basically this is a sample of the Galaxy. This is absolutely unprecedented, and we’re obviously incredibly excited. I should mention parenthetically that there is a fantastic launch video — taken from the POV of the rocket on the JPL Stardust website — highly recommended — best I’ve ever seen — all the way from the launch pad, too. Basically interplanetary trajectory. Absolutely great.

Is the video available to the public?

Yes [see below]. OK, I digress. The first challenge that we have before can do any kind of analysis of these interstellar dust particles is simply to find them. This is a big challenge because they are very small (order of micron in size) and are somewhere (we don’t know where) on a HUGE collector— at least on the scale of the particle size — about a tenth of a square meter. So…

We’re right now using an automated microscope that we developed several years ago for nuclear astrophysics work to scan the collector in the Cosmic Dust Lab in Building 31 at Johnson Space Center. This is the ARES group that handles returned samples (Moon Rocks, Genesis chips, Meteorites, and Interplanetary Dust Particles collected by U2 in the stratosphere). The microscope collects stacks of digital images of the aerogel collectors in the array. These images are sent to us — we compress them and convert them into a format appropriate for Stardust@home.

Stardust@home is a highly distributed project using a “Virtual Microscope” that is written in html and javascript and runs on most browsers — no downloads are required. Using the Virtual Microscope volunteers can search over the collector for the tracks of the interstellar dust particles.

How many samples do you anticipate being found during the course of the project?

Great question. The short answer is that we don’t know. The long answer is a bit more complicated. Here’s what we know. The Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft carried dust detectors onboard that Eberhard Gruen and his colleagues used to first detect and them measure the flux of interstellar dust particles streaming into the solar system. (This is a kind of “wind” of interstellar dust, caused by the fact that our solar system is moving with respect to the local interstellar medium.) Markus Landgraf has estimated the number of interstellar dust particles that should have been captured by Stardust during two periods of the “cruise” phase of the interplanetary orbit in which the spacecraft was moving with this wind. He estimated that there should be around 45 particles, but this number is very uncertain — I wouldn’t be surprised if it is quite different from that. That was the long answer! One thing that I should say…is that like all research, the outcome of what we are doing is highly uncertain. There is a wonderful quote attributed to Einstein — “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called “research”, would it?”

How big would the samples be?

We expect that the particles will be of order a micron in size. (A millionth of a meter.) When people are searching using the virtual microscope, they will be looking not for the particles, but for the tracks that the particles make, which are much larger — several microns in diameter. Just yesterday we switched over to a new site which has a demo of the VM (virtual microscope) I invite you to check it out. The tracks in the demo are from submicron carbonyl iron particles that were shot into aerogel using a particle accelerator modified to accelerate dust particles to very high speeds, to simulate the interstellar dust impacts that we’re looking for.

And that’s on the main Stardust@home website [see below]?

Yes.

How long will the project take to complete?

Partly the answer depends on what you mean by “the project”. The search will take several months. The bottleneck, we expect (but don’t really know yet) is in the scanning — we can only scan about one tile per day and there are 130 tiles in the collector…. These particles will be quite diverse, so we’re hoping that we’ll continue to have lots of volunteers collaborating with us on this after the initial discoveries. It may be that the 50th particle that we find will be the real Rosetta stone that turns out to be critical to our understanding of interstellar dust. So we really want to find them all! Enlarging the idea of the project a little, beyond the search, though is to actually analyze these particles. That’s the whole point, obviously!

And this is the huge advantage with this kind of a mission — a “sample return” mission.

Most missions rather do things quite differently… you have to build an instrument to make a measurement and that instrument design gets locked in several years before launch practically guaranteeing that it will be obsolete by the time you launch. Here exactly the opposite is true. Several of the instruments that are now being used to analyze the cometary dust did not exist when the mission was launched. Further, some instruments (e.g., synchrotrons) are the size of shopping malls — you don’t have a hope of flying these in space. So we can and will study these samples for many years. AND we have to preserve some of these dust particles for our grandchildren to analyze with their hyper-quark-gluon plasma microscopes (or whatever)!

When do you anticipate the project to start?

We’re really frustrated with the delays that we’ve been having. Some of it has to do with learning how to deal with the aerogel collectors, which are rougher and more fractured than we expected. The good news is that they are pretty clean — there is very little of the dust that you see on our training images — these were deliberately left out in the lab to collect dust so that we could give people experience with the worst case we could think of. In learning how to do the scanning of the actual flight aerogel, we uncovered a couple of bugs in our scanning software — which forced us to go back and rescan. Part of the other reason for the delay was that we had to learn how to handle the collector — it would cost $200M to replace it if something happened to it, so we had to develop procedures to deal with it, and add several new safety features to the Cosmic Dust Lab. This all took time. Finally, we’re distracted because we also have many responsibilities for the cometary analysis, which has a deadline of August 15 for finishing analysis. The IS project has no such deadline, so at times we had to delay the IS (interstellar, sorry) in order to focus on the cometary work. We are very grateful to everyone for their patience on this — I mean that very sincerely.

And rest assured that we’re just as frustrated!

I know there will be a “test” that participants will have to take before they can examine the “real thing”. What will that test consist of?

The test will look very similar to the training images that you can look at now. But.. there will of course be no annotation to tell you where the tracks are!

Why did NASA decide to take the route of distributed computing? Will they do this again?

I wouldn’t say that NASA decided to do this — the idea for Stardust@home originated here at U. C. Berkeley. Part of the idea of course came…

If I understand correctly it isn’t distributed computing, but distributed eyeballing?

…from the SETI@home people who are just down the hall from us. But as Brian just pointed out. this is not really distributed computing like SETI@home the computers are just platforms for the VM and it is human eyes and brains who are doing the real work which makes it fun (IMHO).

That said… There have been quite a few people who have expressed interested in developing automated algorithms for searching. Just because WE don’t know how to write such an algorithm doesn’t mean nobody does. We’re delighted at this and are happy to help make it happen

Isn’t there a catch 22 that the data you’re going to collect would be a prerequisite to automating the process?

That was the conclusion that we came to early on — that we would need some sort of training set to be able to train an algorithm. Of course you have to train people too, but we’re hoping (we’ll see!) that people are more flexible in recognizing things that they’ve never seen before and pointing them out. Our experience is that people who have never seen a track in aerogel can learn to recognize them very quickly, even against a big background of cracks, dust and other sources of confusion… Coming back to the original question — although NASA didn’t originate the idea, they are very generously supporting this project. It wouldn’t have happened without NASA’s financial support (and of course access to the Stardust collector). Did that answer the question?

Will a project like this be done again?

I don’t know… There are only a few projects for which this approach makes sense… In fact, I frankly haven’t run across another at least in Space Science. But I am totally open to the idea of it. I am not in favor of just doing it as “make-work” — that is just artificially taking this approach when another approach would make more sense.

How did the idea come up to do this kind of project?

Really desperation. When we first thought about this we assumed that we would use some sort of automated image recognition technique. We asked some experts around here in CS and the conclusion was that the problem was somewhere between trivial and impossible, and we wouldn’t know until we had some real examples to work with. So we talked with Dan Wertheimer and Dave Anderson (literally down the hall from us) about the idea of a distributed project, and they were quite encouraging. Dave proposed the VM machinery, and Josh Von Korff, a physics grad student, implemented it. (Beautifully, I think. I take no credit!)

I got to meet one of the stardust directors in March during the Texas Aerospace Scholars program at JSC. She talked about searching for meteors in Antarctica, one that were unblemished by Earth conditions. Is that our best chance of finding new information on comets and asteroids? Or will more Stardust programs be our best solution?

That’s a really good question. Much will depend on what we learn during this official “Preliminary Examination” period for the cometary analysis. Aerogel capture is pretty darn good, but it’s not perfect and things are altered during capture in ways that we’re still understanding. I think that much also depends on what question you’re asking. For example, some of the most important science is done by measuring the relative abundances of isotopes in samples, and these are not affected (at least not much) by capture into aerogel.

Also, she talked about how some of the agencies that they gave samples to had lost or destroyed 2-3 samples while trying to analyze them. That one, in fact, had been statically charged, and stuck to the side of the microscope lens and they spent over an hour looking for it. Is that really our biggest danger? Giving out samples as a show of good faith, and not letting NASA example all samples collected?

These will be the first measurements, probably, that we’ll make on the interstellar dust There is always a risk of loss. Fortunately for the cometary samples there is quite a lot there, so it’s not a disaster. NASA has some analytical capabilities, particularly at JSC, but the vast majority of the analytical capability in the community is not at NASA but is at universities, government labs and other institutions all over the world. I should also point out that practically every analytical technique is destructive at some level. (There are a few exceptions, but not many.) The problem with meteorites is that except in a very few cases, we don’t know where they specifically came from. So having a sample that we know for sure is from the comet is golden!

I am currently working on my Bachelor’s in computer science, with a minor in astronomy. Do you see successes of programs like Stardust to open up more private space exploration positions for people such as myself. Even though I’m not in the typical “space” fields of education?

Can you elaborate on your question a little — I’m not sure that I understand…

Well, while at JSC I learned that they mostly want Engineers, and a few science grads, and I worry that my computer science degree with not be very valuable, as the NASA rep told me only 1% of the applicants for their work study program are CS majors. I’m just curious as to your thoughts on if CS majors will be more in demand now that projects like Stardust and the Mars missions have been great successes? Have you seen a trend towards more private businesses moving in that direction, especially with President Bush’s statement of Man on the Moon in 2015?

That’s a good question. I am personally not very optimistic about the direction that NASA is going. Despite recent successes, including but not limited to Stardust, science at NASA is being decimated.

I made a joke with some people at the TAS event that one day SpaceShipOne will be sent up to save stranded ISS astronauts. It makes me wonder what kind of private redundancy the US government is taking for future missions.

I guess one thing to be a little cautious about is that despite SpaceShipOne’s success, we haven’t had an orbital project that has been successful in that style of private enterprise It would be nice to see that happen. I know that there’s a lot of interest…!

Now I know the answer to this question… but a lot do not… When samples are found, How will they be analyzed? Who gets the credit for finding the samples?

The first person who identifies an interstellar dust particle will be acknowledged on the website (and probably will be much in demand for interviews from the media!), will have the privilege of naming the particle, and will be a co-author on any papers that WE (at UCB) publish on the analysis of the particle. Also, although we are precluded from paying for travel expenses, we will invite those who discover particles AND the top performers to our lab for a hands-on tour.

We have some fun things, including micromachines.

How many people/participants do you expect to have?

About 113,000 have preregistered on our website. Frankly, I don’t have a clue how many will actually volunteer and do a substantial amount of searching. We’ve never done this before, after all!

One last thing I want to say … well, two. First, we are going to special efforts not to do any searching ourselves before we go “live”. It would not be fair to all the volunteers for us to get a jumpstart on the search. All we are doing is looking at a few random views to make sure that the focus and illumination are good. (And we haven’t seen anything — no surprise at all!) Also, the attitude for this should be “Have Fun”. If you’re not having fun doing it, stop and do something else! A good maxim for life in general!

Friday, October 5, 2007

Johan Boyden is running for the Communist Party in the Ontario provincial election, in the Toronto Centre riding. Wikinews interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.