A buy free artane best price jelly doctor may also recommend that a person wear a cast, buy cheapest celebrex brace, or splint and use a crutch to limit any viagra tablet weight on the affected joint. In addition, lifestyle modifications can cheap prozac in usa help control blood pressure, such as quitting smoking and limiting ventolin overnight shipping alcohol. Anyone who wishes to apply may find that it glucophage sale helps their case to keep all documents from medical appointments, robaxin scans, or laboratory appointments and work closely with their doctor. cafergot in us Seeking professional support, such as psychotherapy, can aid individuals in spiriva managing persistent patterns of narcissistic rage in their relationships. Dry zyprexa information needling is a physical therapy in which a practitioner inserts buy generic griseofulvin threadlike, thin needles into muscle trigger points or soft tissue. store get generic without estradiol prescription Cortical blindness denotes a loss of vision due to damage alesse (ovral l) no prescription in the visual cortex rather than from a condition within estrace online stores the eyes. For example, specialized cells in red blood cells cheapest serevent price make proteins that carry oxygen from air to the rest of.

As we wrote Blown to Bits, we came to recognize that many of the stories in the news were “bits stories.” Sometimes it’s a bit of stretch, other times far less so. Consider world hunger.

The price of rice has been rising. A story last month in the New York Times reported that rice producing coountries were cutting back on exports, civil unrest was rising, and a crisis loomed. For populations that spend a large portion of their income on food, populations where rice is often a staple of their diet, these increases can be devastating. It is a complex problem with potentially dire consequences.

But how is it a bits story?

The University of Washington’s “Nutritious Rice for the World” project is seeking to mitigate world hunger by analyzing rice proteins. The goal is to make it possible for farmers to grow rice strains with higher yields, greater resistance to disease, and even improved nutrition. It’s a noble cause, and a difficult scientific and technical problem. The computational needs of the project are enormous. Using conventional computing approaches the time to complete the analysis could well be measured in centuries.

We could just wait for computing power to increase. With computers doubling their performance approximately every year (close enough for this calculation), in a a decade, they will be 1000X faster. A task that would take 200 years using todays’ computers should take 73 days then. Wait another decade, and they will be 1,000,000 times faster and our protein analysis will take less than 2 hours. But the rice crisis won’t wait that long.

The team at the University of Washington had a better solution – harness the aggregate computing capacity of thousands and thousands of otherwise idle computers – your computer and mine (if you choose to participate). They joined the World Computing Grid project.

A computing grid is a loose collection of computers that work cooperatively, each doing a small portion of a large computing task. It’s similar to the way Google works – dividing the processing of your query across lots and lots of computers so that the response is fast. This particular grid joins technology and social involvement, allowing individuals to “contribute” unused computer time. In addition to analyzing rice proteins, WCG now has active programs for cancer research, AIDS, protein folding, denque fever, and more. The WCG harnesses the computing power of over 1,000,000 computers from more than 380,000 participants.

This is one more example of the transformative power of the digital revolution. Not only is it possible to do complex protein structure analysis, but also we can share the task across thousands, even millions of computer linked through the Internet, computers that belong to ordinary citizens of the world, with a shared purpose, part of a community that has been made possible only by virtue of the social connectivity that the Web engenders and supports.

Even world hunger is a bits story.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Social computing, The explosion, What is information?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.