I just entered my account number at Chevron/Texaco’s site, in order to recover a lost user name. The form to do so simply has a text box saying “Account Number.” When I look at my account number on my bill, as printed by them, it is a sequence of numbers separated by hyphens, so I type it in as they give it to me on my bill. So of course, it kicks out an error message, telling me not to include any dashes or spaces.
I find it easier to separate the subnumbers, because it makes the number easier to read and verify. Back when I was doing web site ecommerce (over a decade ago), I found it a trivial task to write a line of perl that would strip out extraneous characters, and convert the string to a pure string of digits. Has the technology degraded since then to the point that they have to annoy their customers by making them enter a perfectly valid number twice?
Last year, Dr Terry Strom and his team demonstrated that they could stop the on-going destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in mice using a combination of three drugs, although they were unable to regenerate the cells.
However, when they added an extra ingredient – an enzyme called alpha 1 anti-trypsin – a significant rise in the number of beta cells was seen.
I’m not sure what the point is here:
It is exciting that these drugs could stop the immune system from attacking insulin-producing cells, but it is too early to tell whether these cells recovered in the mice or if new cells were produced.
Does it matter, from a practical standpoint? I can understand why the researchers would be curious, but a cure is a cure.
Anyway, here’s hoping that it can work in higher mammals.