There's a notice on their website homepage, something about a 3rd party's services being down, although not worded very politely. I presume lots of other people attempted to contact them about it.
PS: Are you with Trilab by any chance? Look on https://www.powerdns.com/about.html "Trilab hosts a PowerDNS based DNS hosting service called "PowerDNS.Net Hosting". This is a service of Trilab, and not of PowerDNS.COM BV."
Their homepage is http://powerdns.net/, not http://powerdns.com/; and yes they are incorporated as TriLab. Like I said, they're (PowerDNS application & TriLab) hosted on their own their own infrastructure, which is currently hosed.
So basically, PowerDNS.COM BV is doing a public service to TriLab BV by putting up a notice. And of course, one is bound to lose politesse when held responsible for stuff one hasn't done or isn't responsible for.
And, no I am not with Trilab and I have nothing to do with their service besides being a harrowed paying customer.
The healthiest approach is to make time for side projects or other non-software related hobbies you may have.
You're being unrealistic. Try lowering your expectations of other people and if you can't find complete fulfillment in your job, just search for it in something else. A job is just a job at the end of the day, you're primarily doing it for money. Not everyone is lucky to both have money and the ideal job at the same time.
It really isn't worth filling your mind with negativity about aspects that aren't fully under your control, which usually is the case when you're working for other people.
Just do your best, let the higher-ups worry about the rest, continue growing professionally through your side-projects and take good care of your health. It may sound silly, but going to the gym for instance, eating healthier, having a regular sleeping schedule can do a lot to lower your anxiety and in turn make your less than ideal job(s) easier to bare.
Some free protocols, but most are not/are available on a subscription basis, but http://www.springerprotocols.com/ could be a much suitable alternative. However, I'm sceptical that your company hasn't heard of them, perhaps it's an issue of available funds for it unfortunately.
There's already Springer Protocols (http://www.springerprotocols.com/), not free, but IMHO, universities and research facilities already have it better than whatever free alternative may come up in the future. This is not the sort of project that requires only upfront costs, this is why I unfortunately don't think it will live for long, if it ever gets completely funded.
From what I could tell, it's the full version of 'Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures Using Python 2nd ed', 2011. I haven't read it cover to cover, but it seemed well written. You can read some reviews on the printed version at http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-Algorithms-Structures-...
You should consider listing the topics it helps you cover, I think it would be a great selling point and help convert visitors to buyers faster.
I noticed one of the slides (not the 1st) contains a blurry phone image in the right corner with what I think might be some sort of table of contents: linked lists, trees, stacks & queues, etc.
Perhaps to keep the description terse you could group the features using something like: 'the most important data structures, problem-solving heuristics and math'.
This is only vaguely scientific and that only in the beginning of the article. It then progressively reads more like some excited, clueless retelling of other people's psychotic-like experiences. I can't even begin to understand the parallel to set theory mentioned in the piece.
Yeah, the set theory bit was kinda bull shit. It's really nothing like set theory other than the word "contains". And the "Mathematicians have seen that far" sounds like typical snake oil selling.
For anyone else wondering on what types of cancer this might work on, from [1]:
Q: Which cancers will 9DS work on?
A: We don't have a definitive answer, but initial tests show that it's strongest against some forms of renal (kidney) cancer, melanoma(skin) cancer, and triple-negative breast cancer. We have reason to believe that variants of 9DS will target different cancer types, as well.
Well given I already had one melanoma I would be interesting in anything that solves that area. But how do a layman determine whether they are on to something or not?
This is the question you most need to answer. Why is this project, of all possible projects, a good scientific bet?
Biology is complicated, which makes layman explanations a challenge.
Perhaps the best you can do is lay out in clear terms what you know and what you don't. This compound has been shown to be XXX±XXX% effective against these three cancers. It has also been shown to kill 90% of test animals. These three respected theory papers [1,2,3] have highlighted the fact that, if only the animals hadn't died, this compound would be more promising than YYY,ZZZ, and QQQ. Furthermore, in these references [4-10], making the modification we propose to make (9DS) in other related substances has been shown to reduce lethality by 100x. Our goal is to explore this alteration to see if we can address the lethality of the compound while preserving its anti-cancer properties.
Give people the references, and some laymen will dig all day long. Motivated people are really smart.
totally understood. It's really good that you're holding my feet to the fire. It's a little bit buried, but linked from the "details" page is the full proposal:
I apologize, I had accidentally put in a wrong link there previously, it's been fixed, but the file has been publically available and visible for a while. Some non-scientific aspects (like our launch date) have obviously been changed at the last minute, but the proposal stands.
This is research funding. He's trying to raise money to see if it's something or not. If he can raise the money this way, then he can release it without patent encumbrance, and it's for everyone - including the world's poor.
Most drugs fail. This one probably will too.
I gave because I want to see intellectual property not be the only viable funding path anymore.
well we are trying to stack the deck in the drug's favor. A few things:
1) it's a "natural product derivative". These compounds do way way better than most other drug classes.
2) it has single-digit nanomolar activity in the dish. This is on-par and competitive with currently used chemotherapeutics, a prerequisite for any sort of chemotherapy.
3) there is another compound in the same family called SJG-136 which has passed phase II.
4) phase I trials for SJG-136 apparently showed extremely mild side effects. I still need to double-check clinicaltrials.gov on this, this was a personal communication from the developer of SJG-136. Because SJG-136 and 9DS broadly share the same mechanism it's very likely that 9DS will also have mild side effects.
To answer ThomPete's question, I'm not sure how I can verify this besides "trust me" to the layperson (especially #4). However, there is literature on #1 and #2, although, again I'm not sure how useful this is to the lay person.
Yes, but don't all pharma researchers "stack their decks" in similar ways, to maximize their chance of success? And still fail with the dismal statistics I linked to?
For example, the trend now is toward maintenance drugs and biologicals, because that's what the execs want. Whether or not this has anything to do with efficacy is questionable. During my biophysics days, I saw so many drugs enter the clinical pipeline even purporting to treat alzheimers, that were basically following up on "popular memes in the field" that from first principles I would look at and say, there's no way this will work.
I've spoken to one pharma consultant (to get the chat, I didn't tell him I was making an unpatented drug) who basically lamented what had happened to the cancer field as the big companies lost their R&D and turned to acquiring biotechs for their blue sky stuff - and he characterized biotechs as being on to "fad-dey" stuff. Now, it's alos possible that he's wrong too, and that I'm on the wrong track. So you are correct to worry about the likelihood of success.
I don't know how bad pharma politics are, but I have hard time imagining they're worse than crowdfunding! I think no one on this site really understands what you're doing. We know you're more credible than a homeopathic scam artist, which is to our credit because the broader crowdfunding demographic is unlikely to figure out the difference. (See fig. 1, sales of homeopathic remedies in billion USD). But would you trust us to figure out that your compound is more promising than some other one, with similar-looking technical jargon, proposed by similarly credentialed researchers?
I think the concept is incredibly radical. If this were a business idea, it would be functionally illegal: you could only solicit funding from wealthy, accredited investors under highly regulated procedures. Because people are easily mislead. And that's for stupid things like selling sporks. But here we are, pretending to scrutinize a million-dollar medical research grant, as if we were PhDs at the NIH office or something. Where do you want to go with this?
Just FYI, I wouldn't put too much faith in safety profiles of related family drugs. The classic med chem example of really unpredictable toxicology is mevastatin vs lovastatin, which have exactly the same structure but for one lowly methyl group. The former molecule was basically an unusably toxic drug candidate that never would have been approved by the FDA, whereas the latter was the first safe and effective statin to go to market.
it's a known mechanistic issue. the pyrrolobenzodiazepine molecules are pretty selective DNA alkylators. Cardiotox is caused probably by transport chain involvement when the 9-position is oxygenated (makes it look like Co-Q). Without that oxygen, the PBDs zip on over to the DNA. PBDs have a slight twist to the molecule which allows them to nestle in the minor groove with exactly the right pitch so that the lesion evades base excision repair response, which is what is thought to cause the more serious side effects in DNA-alkylating chemotherapies.
However, you are right, there could be unforseen toxicity issues.
If I remember correctly Elsevier's rules, in case the article is from a subscription-based journal (non-open access) they retain copyright to the final published peer-reviewed & formatted article. The author is allowed to share their final published paper only in a 'scholarly' context, which seems to mean anything but mass dissemination; you're allowed to share it with your peers privately, but not post it on your site for example. I've just re-checked and it seems this rule is still enforced: http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-re...
OK, but to be fair, this seems to be slimy behavior on the part of Elsevier, not Academia.edu. Why should academics give up self-publishing rights just to go through peer review and get published?
Because, before the internet was widespread and used for distribution, the only way to get your research out was to be published in journals. Part of this deal involves handing over the rights to your paper to the publishers. This is pretty standard procedure: JK Rowling isn't going to be going giving rights to penguin books for the Harry potter books while she has a contract whereby Bloomberg publish the books currently, it's a similar idea.
Additionaly, the measure of an academics success is based on his (or her) citations, and if your citations are from "website of some guy", nobody is going to take you seriously. It's a vicious circle, and the whole system needs reforming, however the thing is, conferences such as SIGGRAPH, FOCS, INFOCOM etc etc all play an important role, that they offer peer reviewing, and you can guarantee quality (if something is published in SIGGRAPH, then you can normally rely on it). Until there are viable alternatives, which are accepted and can ensure that the quality of the articles appearing is of a high enough quality, this isn't going to change.
I think it's possible it might've happened although I don't know a specific case. I have read about several instances of gamers having died as a result of prolonged sitting and developing deep vein thrombosis though. Here is an example: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/xbox-addict-chris-stan...
