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The Music Industry

So the new Switchfoot album came out on Tuesday and Brooke and I decided to buy it. Well, I was looking it up online to see how much it cost at various places and I noticed that the CD is copy-protected. This means that Windows users can find it difficult to copy the music on the CD to their computer, let alone to another CD. After discovering this, we decided that it’d be cheaper to just buy the CD through Wal-Mart’s music download service (Brooke had done it before…), getting the CD (plus an extra “promotional song”) for $9.44. This way, it’d not only be cheaper to buy the CD, but it’s also already be in a digital format, making it easy to burn the CD (as we would have done anyway).

…well…we downloaded the album and got all the tracks. Brooke listened to the first one to make sure it worked, and it did. Then she tried to burn them. Wouldn’t work. Kept popping up various copy-protection error messages. Not. Pleased.

I ended up having to call Wal-Mart’s music service to ask what was up. Apparently, to burn the files, you have to download them to your computer, then open up each one in Windows Media Player, thereby prompting the download of a license for EACH SONG. So I had to sit there and open up each song manually in WMP…and then could only burn it using WMP (not Nero, or some other CD burning software). Not. Pleased.

So we jumped through the hoops and got it burned. Now, I’m ripping the album into .mp3 format using a program called CDex, which is a). completely free and b). can get around copy-protected CDs. In order to get around it, you need to make sure that you put the CD in your computer and DON’T run the “autoplay” software…’cause when you do that, it installs some license crap on your system, preventing you from copying or ripping the album. Just open up CDex and rip it into your preferred format…

This crap also comes up at the same time that the music industry is trying to get Steve Jobs to raise the prices of music downloads at iTunes. There’s a full article, but to quote a key part:

“To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer … Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past … We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue … We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.” — Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music Group CEO

So, Steve Jobs said last week that the music industry is greedy for trying to raise prices on iTunes downloads…and Bronfman gave the reply seen above. I think Jobs was proved right, eh?

Mr. Bronfman, the minute you stop paying talent-less “musicians” millions of dollars a year just so that they can continue living extravagantly, then I’ll consider listening to your comments… The music industry apparently has plenty of money, otherwise “artists” like Britney Spears, P. Diddy, Jennifer Lopez, and Jessica Simpson wouldn’t be raking it in every year. How about you drop their salaries to something reasonable (like…hell…$200,000 in a year…sound good enough?) and use the extra revenue to a). stop complaining so much, and b). find some good artists to promote… Otherwise, you and your company don’t need that kind of cash…it could be better spent feeding a third-world country…or hell…this country…

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Of exams and triumph…

So, I took my first exam today…and it wasn’t terribly difficult, but the section I was most worried about was Dr. Shilati’s… It was a 10 point question (out of 80…so relatively hefty…) asking you to describe the process whereby you would assay a protein for a given function, how you would purify it, and how you would observe if it works in vivo (i.e. in a living organism). So I wrote out my answer (took 1.5 pages…) and wasn’t terribly confident, mainly on the last part of that question… After talking to other students in the class, all of us were worried about that whole question…which means that, theoretically, the curve will work out fine with all of us in the same spot… The rest of the test was generally alright…I dropped the ball on one 4 pt question, but was confident on the remainder of the exam…

…well…then I was walking back to the lab from getting a soda and Dr. Shilati stops me in the hall…and says “good job on my section of the test”…

…score one for Dr. Andy Linsenbardt, Ph.D… 😀

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How chemists do it…

Per my grand-little’s away message (Sarah Hobbs…in AXE @ Truman…):

How chemists do it…

Chemists do it reactively.

Chemists do it in test tubes.

Chemists do it in equilibrium.

Chemists do it in the fume hood.

Chemsits do it in an excited state.

Chemists do in periodically on the table.

Chemists do in organically and inorganically.

Electrochemists do it with greater potential.

Polymer chemists do it in chains.

Pharmaceutical chemists do it with drugs.

Analytical chemists to it with precision and accuracy.

…so true on so many levels…

…stoopid grad skool and studying for tests…grrrrrrrrrrrr…

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It all comes down to this…

So Thursday is my first exam in BBS 501, which is our basic biomedical sciences course that all 1st year graduate students take in their first semester… Thus far, it’s really just been a review of biochem class from Truman State… The thing I’m slightly worried about is the amount of material being covered. I’ve been through 16 lecture periods at 1 hr each…which translates to over 5 weeks of MWF classes at Truman… So yeah, when you think of it that way, 5 weeks of material in any science class is a decent amount…but at least it has been mostly review…

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve described how grading is done here. It’s all graded on a curve (such that, typically, a 70% is considered a “B”…) and you’re graded with your peers from previous years, so they’ve been keeping records of how students have done over the past 7 years of the program. Therefore, if the average of all those students (~50 – 60 people) on this test was an 80% being an “A”, then that’s what this will be… So yeah, it matters how well we as a class do…but it also matters in reference to previous years, not just ourselves… I’m not sure whether to take this as a good thing or not…probably, I guess… We do get 3 hours to complete the exam, so that’s somewhat comforting.

Also, we aren’t taught by one professor. We have a rotating group that teaches each section. This time, we had 4 different professors. Each professor gets 5 points-worth of questions per lecture period so, for example, Dr. Shilatifard taught us for 2 lectures…meaning he can only write 10 pts for the exam. So if I really didn’t understand his stuff, then it’ll account for 10 points out of the 80 possible… At least I know generally how many points each day is worth going into the exam…it’s a little easier to pick out the key points of each day this way…I guess… We were also encouraged by our advisor to seek out old exams so that we know how each professor words their questions…and, supposedly, these questions don’t change much from year to year…

Therefore, this week has got me studying for my first exam of graduate school. It’s especially difficult to study knowing that a). I get a full day off on Wednesday to study for the Thursday exam, b). it’s all been review material thus far and c). lots of shows are premiering this week, so I want to watch TV instead… 😛

I’m not sure whether to be worried, though. There are a few things going for us and a few things going against us… I guess, in the end, it all comes down to how much effort I put in over the next few days…

…and how many beers I have… 😀

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…mmmm…fly paper…

So, Nathan said he wanted to know what I’m up to in my research rotation for the next few weeks… I’m working for Dr. Joel Eissenberg (who reminds me quite a bit of Dr. Buckner at Truman…) in the Department of Biochemistry. He works primarily with fruit flies, but most specifically, a protein known as dELL. This protein is known as an “RNA elongation factor.” For those who know anything about genetics, DNA is coded into mRNA by RNA Polymerase II; Pol II will sometimes pause along the transcription process, thereby causing the DNA to be transcribed more slowly. dELL prevents this “transient pausing,” allowing transcription to be carried out more efficiently. dELL has also been linked to leukemia (which is how it was discovered in the first place).

Anyway, Dr. Eissenberg is trying to get various characteristics of dELL from his research. I’m taking part in the work by using a technique known as gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE, to be more specific…) to isolate the protein from extracts obtained from fly cells. I then take the gel and apply it to a Western Blot analysis. The protein extracts (nuclear extracts, technically…meaning that they came from the cell’s nucleus…) are obtained by either Size-Exclusion Chromatography or Ion Exchange Chromatography, neither of which I’ll explain, but they’re both pretty cool… On the Western Blots, we use selective antibodies to detect and expose the proteins we’re interested in…one antibody binds to dELL and then a second antibody binds to the first one…but that second antibody has a luminescent “probe” (i.e. chemical) attached that allows us to see it… By carrying out this whole process, we are able to see in which cells/extracts/etc. that dELL is present and/or active.

There’s a lot more to it, honestly…most of which I don’t know. Regardless, I’m just running a bunch of SDS-PAGEs and Westerns right now…both of which are relatively time consuming…so it takes me a good two afternoons to take care of each of them… It’s relatively interesting, but not really what I want to do with the rest of my life. If anything, it’s interesting to see how proteins are isolated and such…seeing how all of this has been done in the past…

…and why everyone hates Western Blots… 😛

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Nintendo Revolution

Wanna see the controller? Here it is:

Nintendo Revolution Controller

Nintendo Revolution

And here’s an article about it….

Think of the possibilities! You can use the thing as a fishing real/baseball bat/hockey stick/etc. in sports games…you can use it “Minority Report”-style in strategy games (pointing to a location on a map, zooming in, moving units, etc.)…and for the first-person shooter folks, you can use the controller as a gun (there’s a trigger on the bottom side), use it as a sword, etc. The possibilities are almost limitless!

w00t! Xbox 360 can suck it…

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Of Paltering and People

So, a “palter” is a lie, for the record… Secondly, I refer to a book that is being pushed in Kansas and other states/communities that masquerades as a science “textbook” known as Of Pandas and People.

I only bring this up because I’ve been watching “The Daily Show” this week while they’ve been doing their “Evolution shmevolution” series, looking at the “evidence” for or against evolution, intelligent design, etc. Overall, there’s been something of a liberal bias (…not unexpected…), visiting sites like Dover, TN (the side of the Scope’s Monkey Trial) and talking to the conservatives there (they’re like those crazy townies that live in the trailer park on the other side of town…freaky, yo…).

Anyway, last night, Lewis Black brought up this book…and actually showed it to the audience. He showed the cover…and then slid it around to its side… The stupid thing is only 170 pages long!!! How much “science” can you learn anything from a book like that? There are some classes in college where you read that much in a night! I also found this website (web hosted by the Kansas Citizens for Science) by a professor at Brown University and he points out some serious flaws, places in this book that the author (Percival Davis) refuses to acknowledge (like extinction…something we know to be fact, but it isn’t mentioned in the book). An excerpt:

“When I first opened the pages of Pandas and read the fine words presented by its authors in the name of free and open inquiry, I expected a text that might genuinely challenge students to examine the assumptions of what they had learned and evaluate scientific theory in an objective manner. To say that I was disappointed is to put it mildly. What I found instead was a document that contrived not to teach, but to mislead. The many errors and misrepresentations that inhabit the pages in Of Pandas and People will, quite honestly, serve to hinder teachers as they attempt to cover the stunning range and diversity of contemporary biology.”

So yeah, let me line this out… Scientists and most teachers don’t agree with the book. The politicians are pushing it on teachers. Can’t we trust the teachers and scientists to know what to teach in their classes? Do we want politicians coming into our classrooms and teaching? Do they even have a right to dictate what teachers are supposed to teach their students? It’s bad enough that teachers are having to teach their classes based on standardized tests and can’t teach what’s really important…

…important like…oh…I don’t know…real scientific studies and evidence rather than dogma? 😛

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Oh, funny…

Go to http://www.google.com/ and search for “failure”, but be sure to click “I’m Feeling Lucky” instead of the normal search option…

…it’s glorious…and so true… 😉

(this one is credited to Nathan…good man…)

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…relatively amusing…

In an article posted on Yahoo! News about how poorly the box office did this summer…the following was mentioned:

“A documentary about a bunch of birds, March of the Penguins (15th place, $63.6 million), outgrossed the Ridley Scott epic Kingdom of Heaven (21st place, $47.4 million).

To this, I simply smiled… 😀

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A few changes…

Nothing truly important…as usual… First of all, I switched web servers… I was using my old 1.0 GHz Athlon box for my server and my Athlon XP 1900+ for my primary computer…but since getting my laptop, I’ve been using it primarily and my faster box hasn’t really been used…therefore…I switched from the 1.0 GHz Athlon to the faster Athlon XP 1900+ computer…still running Linux, of course… 😛 This may speed things up a little bit, but probably nothing noticeable…

Slightly more obvious a change is the address of this website. http://andyl.homelinux.net/ is (mostly) no more! It’ll still work for awhile…until I decide not to renew it… Regardless, the new address is https://linsenbardt.net/. Yahoo! Domains was running a nifty deal on domain names…so I get it for $2/year…and I paid $10 and now have that address for 5 years…

Anyway, adjust your bookmarks or links from your blogs…https://linsenbardt.net/ is my new address…

Back to studying, I guess…