Letter in response to "Commercial Break" -- Wired

Below is a letter I wrote in response to the article at bottom (which was never published). Might be interesting in relation to magazine advertising. Viz:
I read with great interest the article about the innovative way that
Chevrolet decided to advertise its Tahoe SUV -- by trying to stimulate
lots of user generated content, some of it not so favorable. Taken to
the extreme, the logical extension of this strategy would be that
advertising should aim not so much to create a positive message as to
create buzz for its own sake. Thus, a successful advertising campaign
would simply result in an article such as the one I just read --
describing a new phenomenon, loosely associated with a product,
irrespective of its merits or demerits.

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Issue 14.12 - December 2006
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/tahoe.html
Commercial Break
In a risky experiment, Chevrolet asked Web users to make their own video spots
for the Tahoe. A case study in customer generated advertising.
By Frank Rose
Commercial Break
The thinking went something like this: Chevrolet is all about being
revolutionary, right? (That's debatable, but since Chevy's tagline is "An
American Revolution!" this is where all discussion starts at its ad agency.) And
if Chevrolet is revolutionary, then its advertising ought to be, too. Ergo, the
Chevy message needed to escape the tightly controlled, painstakingly monitored,
woefully predictable confines of the 30-second TV spot and roam the online
jungle. But everybody's doing that now. So, Chevy marketers thought, let's take
this thing a notch further – let's have an online contest to see who can create
the best TV ad for the new Tahoe. The wikification of the 30-second spot – what
could be more revolutionary than that?
[L2E]

New Weapon in Web War Over Piracy -- NY Times

Doesn't mention that directly image collections (e.g. flickr or artstor) but this is potentially quite relevant to that.

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New Weapon in Web War Over Piracy
By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: February 19, 2007
Content-recognition software could address a major entertainment industry concern— songs and videos being posted on the Web without permission.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/technology/19video.html?ex=1329541200&en=ac662a919b4ff2cb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Freedom for Prisoners of Voice Mail -- NY Times

Looks interesting... wonder if it's worth a try

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State of the Art

Freedom for Prisoners of Voice Mail

By DAVID POGUE

Published: February 15, 2007

If you're tired of spending time and cellphone minutes listening to the voice-mail lady, try new tools that convert voice messages to text and deliver them by e-mail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/technology/15pogue.html?ex=1329282000&en=0a077798a213507c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
https://simulscribe.com/

ihop-net.org

Perhaps nice to interface with LinkHub, pubnet... .

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http://www.ihop-net.org/UniPub/iHOP

www.levity.com/digaland/whitman

Liked the very interesting Whitman images, which make up one from many. These are similar in some respects to the cover of Nature for the sequencing of the genome (also, linked below).

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http://www.levity.com/digaland/whitman/index.html
http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu/~mbg/dom/fun3/nature-cover/
http://www.nature.com/nature/supplements/collections/humangenome

The Invisible Enemy -- Wired

Interesting pop science article that highlighted the new problem Acinetobacter baumannii has become from the war in Iraq.

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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/enemy.html
The Invisible Enemy
Issue 15.02 - February 2007
The Pentagon created the perfect machine for saving the lives of soldiers wounded in Iraq. But then GIs started getting sick. The culprit: a drug-resistant supergerm infecting the military's evacuation chain.
By Steve Silberman
A homemade bomb exploded under a Humvee in Anbar province, Iraq, on August 21, 2004. The blast flipped the vehicle into the air, killing two US marines and wounding another - a soft-spoken 20-year-old named Jonathan Gadsden who was near the end of his second tour of duty. In previous wars, he would have died within hours. His skull and ribs were fractured, his neck was broken, his back was badly burned, and his stomach had been perforated by shrapnel and debris....
But he still had mysterious symptoms that he couldn't shake, like headaches, rashes, and intermittent fevers. His doctors gave him CT scans, laxatives, methadone, beta-blockers, Xanax, more surgery, and more antibiotics. An accurate evaluation of his case was difficult, however, because portions of his medical records never arrived from Bethesda. If they had, they would have shown a positive test for a kind of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii. In the taxonomy of bad bugs, acinetobacter is classified as an opportunistic pathogen. Healthy people can carry the bacteria on their skin with no ill effects - a process known as colonization. But in newborns, the elderly, burn victims, patients with depressed immune systems, and those on ventilators, acinetobacter infections can kill. The removal of Gadsden's spleen and the traumatic nature of his wounds made him a prime target....

www.eia.doe.gov

Might be nice to correlate with insulation and other durables over time.

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http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/contents.html

Gene Themes

EMINENT DOMINION -- New Yorker

Interesting re-evaluation, coupled with three exhibitions that might be nice to see.

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http://www.newyorker.com/critics/skyline/
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/070205crsk_skyline_goldberger
http://www.learn.columbia.edu/moses/
EMINENT DOMINION
Rethinking the legacy of Robert Moses.
by PAUL GOLDBERGER
Issue of 2007-02-05
Posted 2007-01-29
For a generation, the standard view of Robert Moses has been that he transformed New York but didn't really make it better. This view was shaped by Robert Caro's epic biography "The Power Broker"—published in 1974 and in print ever since. (Parts of it initially ran in this magazine.) Caro portrays Moses as a brilliant political operative who perpetuated his power by means of grand public works....Moses is clearly due for a reëvaluation, and this week sees the opening of "Robert Moses and the Modern City," a huge exhibition that surveys his impact on New York. Organized by Hilary Ballon, an architectural historian at Columbia, the exhibition extends over three institutions. The broadest installation, at the Museum of the City of New York, is called "Remaking the Metropolis," and presents Moses's highway system and the big institutions, like Lincoln Center and the United Nations, that he helped build. "The Road to Recreation," at the Queens Museum of Art, documents Moses's new parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools; and "Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution," at Columbia's Wallach Art Gallery, shows his inventive mastery of the federal government's Title I slum-clearance programs, and the results, both good and bad.
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Data bleach

Total information awareness for worm genetics -- Science

Some relevant worm data integration papers. Integration methods are fairly simple from a computational standpoint.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16527956&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum
Science. 2006 Mar 10;311(5766):1381-2. 
Genetics. Total information awareness for worm genetics.Eddy SR.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5766/1481
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16527984&itool=pubmed_AbstractPlus
Science 10 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5766, pp. 1481 - 1484
DOI: 10.1126/science.1123287
Genome-Wide Prediction of C. elegans Genetic Interactions
Weiwei Zhong and Paul W. Sternberg*

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7052/abs/nature03876.html
Nature 436, 861-865 (11 August 2005) | doi:10.1038/nature03876
Predictive models of molecular machines involved in Caenorhabditis elegans early embryogenesis
Kristin C. Gunsalus et al.

What is biophysics ?

Structures, interactions and functions of biological molecules studied and
understood through the application of quantitative methods based on
physics and chemistry.

Is this the end of the scholarly journal? -- Christian Science Monitor

An interview based on article in the Scientist.

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Is this the end of the scholarly journal?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0124/p14s02-stss.html
Publishing research to blogs and e-books is so easy, some are wondering if peer-reviewed journals are on their way to obsolescence.
By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Scientific advances sometimes come as lightning flashes of inspiration. But when scientists sit down to record and take credit for what they've found, they still use much the same method they have for decades – an article published in a scholarly journal.
But science's hidebound traditions are changing. The Internet has opened up new forms of publishing in which anyone in the world can find and read a scientific paper. And papers themselves are becoming more interactive, leading readers to the underlying data, videos, and discussions that augment their value. With blogs and e-books providing easy means of self-publishing, some observers are speculating that scholarly journals and their controversial system of peer reviews may not be needed at all.
"The traditional journal publishing medium we've grown used to really needs to evolve and change because that's not the way people are accessing information," says Mark Gerstein, a professor of biomedical informatics at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Dr. Gerstein cowrote an article, "The Death of the Scientific Paper," which appeared last year on The-Scientist.com, an online science magazine....
Already, an online database called arXiv (www.arXiv.org), hosted by Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., contains more than 400,000 scientific papers posted by their authors without peer review. (The papers often appear later in peer-reviewed journals). Its comprehensiveness makes arXiv (pronounced "archive") a valuable tool, Gerstein, the Yale researcher, says. If someone claims to make a new discovery, anyone can search this database and say, "No, you didn't. It's in the arXiv."
Nonetheless, Gerstein says he thinks scientific journals, and some kind of peer review, will be around for a long time. Publishing in prestigious journals is "deeply intertwined with [scientists'] reputations and their promotions," he says. "You still want to get the stamp of approval of a journal."

Don’t Call. Don’t Write. Let Me Be -- NY Times

Lots of advice to remove oneself from spam communication.

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Business

Don't Call. Don't Write. Let Me Be.

By DAMON DARLIN

Published: January 20, 2007

How to get your name off lists, so sales people won't call, junk mail won't come, and spam won't clog the in-box.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/business/20money.html?ex=157680000&en=896f28ce9e43bcc0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
http://www.the-dma.org/consumers/offmailinglist.html
http://donotcall.gov/
http://www.optoutprescreen.com/
http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about-doubleclick/privacy/dart-adserving.asp
http://www.lexisnexis.com/terms/privacy/data/remove.asp

Some random interesting reads in 2005

8-Jan-05 times.com Two Studies Suggest a Protein Has a Big Role in Heart Disease

8-Jan-05 sciencenews.org What's Wrong with This Picture?

5-Jul-05 TechnologyReview.com The Fading Memory of the State

28-Jul-05 sciam.com Nanobodies by Wayt Gibbs

28-Jul-05 wired.com The Birth of Google

Thoughts on Yale Podcasts

Yale Press Podcast -- http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/podcast.asp

Nice episode #1. Liked description of The Yale Book of Quotations and Caesar Life of a Colossus (particularly the Addendum on the later). These were good because they gave to easy to understand overviews of well-worked out existing media (i.e. the books). However, it'd be nice if each podcast could have a brief summary and it's own episode page -- e.g. like http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2005Publish/Jul/hour2_072905.html

Yale OPA podcast -- http://www.yale.edu/opa/podcast

The web page of this is a bit more confusing. Again it'd be nice, if each podcast could have a brief summary and it's own episode page, so you could refer to (and blog) an individual podcast. Some thoughts on specific ones: The podcast "American Foreign Policy: Multilateralism or Unilateralism. From the Yale Tomorrow campaign launch, recorded Sept. 30, 2006." was good but it'd be nice if it were connected with some specific textual material. Likewise for "Nutrition and Cancer Prevention: How diet can prevent cancer. Part of the Yale Cancer Center Healthline Series, recorded May 21, 2006." Again, however, I don't know where to go for more -- a paper, the professor's site, etc. The Tian Xu podcast is engaging. Liked the vision at end of a series of all possible mouse knockouts with high-res MRI to show which cells they affect. The Salzman talk gives a nice vision of developing a community of biomedical engineering. Both of these suffer from the lack of visuals referred to and some context given at the beginning. They are just bare recordings.

Subcompact Camera comparison

Some random stats and links related to finding the optimal subcompact camera.

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddpspxzw_26fdkpfw

Some flowery text on what Synthetic Biology is

Synthetic biology is a natural outgrowth of systems biology in the same way that molecular biotechnology was a natural outgrowth of molecular biology. That is, the molecular biology revolution (in the 1950s and 1960s) led to the discovery of the main molecular actors, thus paving the way for the fields of genetic and molecular engineering in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Goujon, 2001). At present, biology is undergoing another transition, first defining molecular and cellular systems in the context of systems biology and then using these to build new functionalities in the framework of synthetic biology (Arkin & Fletcher, 2006; Endy, 2006; Cassman, 2005; Vidal, 2001; Ge et al., 2003; Kitano, 2002a,b). One the main issues in early synthetic biology is developing sets of standard, interoperable, composable biological parts for manipulation (parts.mit.edu; Endy, 2005).

from wikipedia :

Systems biology is an academic field that seeks to integrate high-throughput biological studies to understand how biological systems function. By studying the relationships and interactions between various parts of a biological system (e.g. metabolic pathways, organelles, cells, physiological systems, organisms etc.) it is hoped that eventually an understandable model of the whole system can be developed.

from wikipedia :

Synthetic biology aims to create novel biological functions and tools by modifying or integrating well-characterized biological components (i.e. genes, promoters) into higher order genetic networks using mathematical modeling to direct the construction towards the desired end product.

Letter in response to "Open-Source Spying" -- NY Times

Here's a letter I wrote in response to the article below (which was never published):
I was very impressed by the recent article in the magazine section about how the
intelligence community could use collective intelligence in the form of wikis
and blogs to help combat potential threats. I think the idea of using collective
intelligence is a great one. However, I was very surprised that the article did
not mention the recent and public episode where it was suggested that Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) establish a Policy Analysis Market to
help predict terrorist threats. In the framework of magazine article, this
proposal appears to be quite prescient. Given the clear incentive of profit,
efficient markets are an even better idea for harnessing collective intelligence
than wikis and blogs. However, this proposal was strongly criticized in the
press and this lead to the resignation of DARPA department head John Poindexter.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html
Open-Source Spying
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 3, 2006
When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003,
he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long
been interested in international relations: he had studied Russian politics and
interned at the U.S. consulate in Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications
of politically persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek
fluent in Web-page engineering...
[L2E]

Letter in response to "A Cryptologist Takes a Crack at Deciphering DNA’s Deep Secrets" -- NY Times

Here's a letter I wrote in response to the article below (which was never published):
I read with great interest the recent "Scientist at Work" piece in Science Times focusing on Nick Patterson. I work in a similar area to Dr. Patterson and liked the way the piece developed the concept of a "Data Analyst". In particular, I thought it important that it showed that in seemingly disparate fields such as Military Intelligence, Finance, and Genomics, there was a common thread of having to grapple with and analyze large amounts of data. Increasingly, the modern world is being transformed by vast sea of social and commercial information being tracked on the internet and by the huge amounts of data being generated by high-throughput scientific experimentation. Because of this, we are increasingly being confronted with large data sets in many fields. The challenge is how to mine them as Dr. Patterson does. A related issue is how we should educate a new generation of ace analysts who can take a more straightforward path to their problem than Dr. Patterson has.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html
Scientist at Work | Nick Patterson
A Cryptologist Takes a Crack at Deciphering DNA's Deep Secrets
By INGFEI CHEN
Published: December 12, 2006
Thirty years ago, Nick Patterson worked in the secret halls of the Government
Communications Headquarters, the code-breaking British agency that unscrambles
intercepted messages and encrypts clandestine communications. He applied his
brain to "the hardest problems the British had," said Dr. Patterson, a
mathematician. Today, at 59, he is tackling perhaps the toughest code of all —
the human genome...Genomics is a third career for Dr. Patterson, who confesses
he used to find biology articles in Nature "largely impenetrable." After 20
years in cryptography, he was lured to Wall Street to help build mathematical
models for predicting the markets. His professional zigzags have a unifying
thread, however: "I'm a data guy," Dr. Patterson said. "What I know about is how
to analyze big, complicated data sets." In 2000, he pondered who had the most
interesting, most complex data sets and decided "it had to be the biology
people."...
[L2E]