Sunday, September 30, 2012

Biologists Replay 500 Million Years Of E Coli Evolution In The Lab

Biology is changing so rapidly and fundamentally that it's hard to keep track of the revolutionary transformations that are afoot.

Here's one of them. Synthetic biology is the design and construction of biological systems not found in nature. This is engineering-- using molecular building blocks to create new biomolecules, such as genes.

Here's another technique. By comparing the DNA of related species, biologists can work out the DNA structure of their common ancestors.

Then, using synthetic biology, they can reconstruct these sequences in the lab. In this way, biologists have begun to resurrect all kinds of ancient biomolecules, including hormone receptors and even ancient molecular machines.

Today, Betül Kaçar and Eric Gaucher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta reveal that they have combined these techniques to perform a remarkable experiment.

These guys have reconstructed an ancient gene from an ancestor of the bacterial organism E coli that lived some 500 million years ago. They've then replaced the modern version of this gene with the ancient one in a population of E coli.

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This is an interesting piece of news that truly makes you think about what scientists can study and possibly prove with new technologies.

Friday, September 28, 2012

Things are moving along

Yesterday was a great day for Hernando County Florida. The members of the Libertarian Party had our vote and elected our incumbent chairman, vice-chair, secretary, and treasure.

With this, we are starting to build a new chapter in Hernando County. One that will lead to a new, powerful voice that will influence politics in the county.

I was nominated to become the chairman of the party in Hernando. I welcome to responsibility and will do everything in my power to support our activism and growth.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Speech 1 - Introduction: Journalism

Speech Outline:

I. Introduction

Journalism has been one of my main passions for the last decade. I enjoyed the work and process needed to create a great articles. My drive to create great, entertaining pieces have lead me to work for one of the most exciting industries write for; the video game industry. It has allowed me to meet many amazing people, and achieve quite a bit of notoriety as a writer. Let me tell you about my experience.

II. Journalism I

a. Mention short term under PlayStation 3 Portal banner before merger.
b. Detail work done at PlayStation Universe

III. Journalism II

a. Start discussing my beginning at VGChartz.com.
b. Discuss Corporate Relations work and mention how high in corporate ladders I have worked with before.
c. Detail other written work done at VGChartz.

IV.. Conclusion

The last decade has been a very enjoyable experience for me as a journalist. Being a journalist in the video game industry was great fun. It allowed me create a vast number of articles, game reviews, and meet some amazing people. The pinnacle of my work forever immortalized on various game box arts, and in my readers minds.



Speech:

Journalism has been one of my main passions for the last decade. I enjoyed the work and process needed to create a great articles. My drive to create great, entertaining pieces have lead me to work for one of the most exciting industries write for; the video game industry. It has allowed me to meet many amazing people, and achieve quite a bit of notoriety as a writer. Let me tell you about my experience.

In 2006, I started writing for a website called PlayStation 3 Portal. It was a small website with ambitious owners looking to grow the site. After a few short months of writing, the website merge with another PlayStation website to become what is now known as PlayStation Universe. With the merger we obtained a much larger reader base, and more call for game reviews, as well as editorials. After assisting with corporate relations work, we started to receive games from publishers to review. I was not with PSU for very long, maybe a year at best. During which I reviewed around 30 titles, wrote 4 editorials, and a few hundred news articles.

Mid 2007, I started to work for VGChartz.com. A very controversial site due to the independent nature of sales tracking the website has become known for. I worked for the site till May 2011. During my four year stay, I worked corporate relations and had earned the direct numbers to CEOs in companies like Sony World Studios, Epic Games, and Electronic Arts. I wrote press releases, news articles and game reviews. I’ve reviewed acclaimed titles like Battlefield Bad Company 2, Rift, and the Sam & Max franchise. A number of the games I reviewed have featured my scores their retail game box arts.

The last decade has been a very enjoyable experience for me as a journalist. Being a journalist in the video game industry was great fun. It allowed me create a vast number of articles, game reviews, and meet some amazing people. The pinnacle of my work forever immortalized on various game box arts, and in my readers minds.

Thank You.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Update 9/15/2012 - School and Liberty

Hello readers!

 Sorry for the slight inactivity. I will continue to post news pieces and give opinions on them as I can. College classes and homework has taken up a good percentage of my time, and I have been asked to take an even greater role in creating an official local charter of the Libertarian Party.

Since I am in a speech class, I think I will post the speeches here. Kind of as a helpful example for those taking Public Speaking, those looking for speech samples, or generally just interested in a reading a random speech. The first speech will probably be posted Tuesday. It is just a basic introduction speech, but it does have my political, journalistic history, and some self-education discussion within,

Thanks for reading my blog and your continued support!

With Liberty,
- Matt Schnackenberg

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Fed will do whatever it takes to get hiring going

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Fed up with the anemic pace of hiring, the Federal Reserve promised Thursday that it would do whatever it takes to reduce unemployment. 

The Fed stepped up its efforts to boost economic growth, opting for a round of quantitative easing, in a meaningful change in its tactics. 

The Federal Open Market Committee said it would buy an additional $40 billion per month in mortgage-backed bonds, above and beyond the bonds it is now buying as a part of Operation Twist. 

This is the QE3 that’s been talked about so much. 
 
Significantly, the new bond-buying plan is open-ended, meaning that the Fed will keep buying long-term bonds until it sees a substantial improvement in the job market. If hiring doesn’t pick up, the Fed could step up the pace of bond-buying until it does. 

The key phrase in the Fed’s statement was this: “If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the Committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price stability.”

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The Federal Reserve has basically declared that QE3 will happen. While Bernanke stated he will only do it if the labor market doesn't improve, there is no way it can while interest rates are artificially low. The economy is in shambled because of his/their actions and therefore needs to be ended, not encouraged. Sadly, there is no way to stop this from happening at this current moment. Expect another depression much deeper than the one the Fed originally created in the 30s.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Dime Cards to Replace U.S. Currency?

I just wanted to share this video. Dime cards are such an interesting idea and a great alternative currency.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Some Of The Really Bad Things That Could Happen If You Do Not Prepare For The Coming Economic Collapse

Most people just assume that since things have always been a certain way that they will always be that way in the future.  Most people just have blind faith that the people running our government and our financial system know exactly what they are doing and that they are doing their best to take care of us.  In fact, once upon a time I was fully convinced of that.  When I was a kid I quickly realized that my elementary school teachers really didn't have the answers, but I had total faith that those running society at the highest levels were "experts" that were looking out for our best interests.  As time went on I kept progressing in my education, and by the time I was finished with law school I came to understand that none of our "experts" really know what they are doing, and they are definitely not looking out for our best interests.  The blind are leading the blind and we all need to finally admit that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.  Unfortunately, most Americans will repeat the mantra of "if that was true I would have heard about it on the news" until it is way too late.  Most people are waiting for the "authorities" to tell them what to do instead of thinking for themselves.  Sadly, time is rapidly running out and a lot of people are going to end up getting totally blindsided by what is coming.

The man in charge of our financial system, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, is not going to save our economy.  He didn't see the last financial crisis coming, and even after things started falling apart he continued to insist that housing prices would not go down and that we would not have a recession.

Well, it turned out that we had the worst housing crash and the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But still millions of Americans are trusting him to save us this time around.
It isn't going to happen.

The truth is that the design of the Federal Reserve system itself is fundamentally flawed.
The biggest reason why the U.S. government is 16 trillion dollars in debt is because the system is designed to create gigantic amounts of government debt.

Yes, without a doubt the vast majority of our politicians are corrupt and/or incompetent, but even if we replaced every single one of them our economic problems would still persist until the underlying structural problems were addressed.

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All I have to say to this is that I agree completely. Those who are unprepared for the crash that will happen needs to get moving and set themselves up for the hard times ahead.