Thursday November 17, 2005

Blood Vessels Grown From Skin

slashdot.org -> nytimes.com :

Two kidney dialysis patients from Argentina have received the world's first blood vessels grown in a laboratory dish from snippets of their own skin, a technique that doctors hope will someday offer a new source of arteries and veins for diabetics and other patients.

Scientists from Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., a small biotechnology company in Novato, Calif., reported the tissue-engineering advance at the annual conference of the American Heart Association.

Because it uses the patient's own tissue, the technique steers clears of the political and ethical debate surrounding embryonic stem cells.

(2005-11-17 17:52:12 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

Story arcs with Google Base

You may be familiar with the concept of story arcs. It's an ongoing story with a series, evolving as time goes on. Could be a TV series, could be a comic series. But over here on this blog, we're talking Real Life (tm). Most of the time, anyway.

There are several ongoing arcs here, Peak Oil is one, obviously, and then there are the mass layoffs, the decline of the American automakers and the American airline companies. We also have tracking of the ongoing progress of hybrid vehicle technology, and on the environmental side of things, there's an ongoing one about China facing its limits to growth.

As an experiment to see how well we can tie various blog entries together into a coherent arc, I've put up a list of items on the newly-launched Google Base.

Click here to check it out :
american auto-makers

The link above sorts by the "publish date" attribute, in descending order. You can also drill down to examine various other attributes and labels such as "news source" and "toyota", for example.

The way I use it, Google Base looks like some kind of "jellyfish database"*. It's mostly a bunch of name-value pairs (they call them attributes) to put up as you wish, mostly unstructured but they have some built-in templates that suggest some common fields, such as Author and Publish Date for the "News and Articles" template.

I'm using the labels to tie the "american auto-makers" items together. Pretty useful, especially seeing how I can also do things like use both "american auto-makers" and "mass layoffs" labels and associate them to this blog entry.

* The "jellyfish" term came from a discussion at my previous company, where someone advocated using an O/R mapping approach without any getters/setters, persisting what are basically Hashmaps with key-value pairs instead of structured JavaBean objects. I remarked that it sounded just like a "jellyfish" - no bones!

Looks like Google Base is doing just that but with a database, breaking away from all known RDBMS concepts. Very interesting, rather Semantic Web-like concept they have going there. Wonder what the wily users will put it to use for. And of course, we're waiting for the cool toolz that should be coming up! :)

(2005-11-17 14:47:06 SGT) [Tech] Permalink Comments [1]

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