Economics

Update (10-1-08) – I’m not the only one who sees a reflection of 1980 in today’s events.

We have been hearing a lot about the economy and credit markets and such the last few weeks. I found some interesting historical data to help place some things in focus and help see what has been happening.

These charts are from the non-partisan group, Demos, and are based on data from named databases.

Currently, the top 1% of households have income above $315,000 and there are about 100 million households in the US. So these 1 million households are now responsible for over 20% of our population’s income.

The last time it was this high, we had a depression starting. But what is interesting is that when we had a strong middle class (following WWII), the top 1% were only responsible for 10% of total income. The much larger middle class made a severe impact on the ultrarich’s total take. A balanced economy seems to have about 10% of the total income come from the top 1% of households.

Yet this trend stopped in 1979, with the rich more than doubling their percentage of the total economy. Looks like the rest of America could not keep up with the top 1%. I wonder what happened in 1980?

Looks like Reagan’s revolution was great for the economy, for businesses and the rich but had little effect on helping the middle class. This can be more easily seen in these two graphs.


Between 1947 and 1979, all families, no matter how wealthy, made about the same income gains. It did not matter if they were in the top 5% or the bottom 20%. In fact, the top 1% may have done slightly less well that the rest of the US. In other words, all of America shared in the same income gains.

Now, since 1979, only the top 1% has made gains comparable to the post-war era. Every other group has seen stagnation, or worse, in their income. The poor are actually making less money today than they were in 1979!

Now it defies reason to believe that starting in 1979 the rich continued to get rewarded for working hard by seeing increases in income while everyone else simply loafed around. Not just some of them but ALL of them. Do we want to say that starting in 1979 95% of all Americans became lazy? Hard to believe since productivity increased 64% in the last 32 years while compensation rose only 12%. There must be macro-economic reasons for this. People did not change. The economy did.

1980 seems to be the inflection point. This is the year when the Republican Revolution and Reaganomics took hold. This has pretty much been government policy for 28 years and we are finally seeing what the effect of Voodoo economics is. The greed of a few at the top has created a bubble that will not pop smoothly without a tremendous amount of luck and ingenuity.

All of us may very well pay for this experiment in economics. Supply-side economics without significant regulatory oversight does not really to appear to be the best economic philosophy for an egalitarian democracy. It seems to be better used for a plutocracy. I guess we will soon see just what sort of government we will have.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Government

A generational war

by kentbye
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]

You’d think Knowledge Management (KM), that venerable IT-based social engineering discipline which came up with evocative phrases like “community of practice,” “expertise locater,” and “knowledge capture,” would be in the vanguard of the 2.0 revolution. You’d be wrong. Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. I suppose I must be a little dense, because it took not one, not two, but three separate incidents before I realized there was a war on. Here’s what’s going on: KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0. And the most hilarious part is that most of the combatants don’t even realize they are in a war. They think they are loosely-aligned and working towards the same ends, with some minor differences of emphasis. So let me tell you about this war and how it is shaping up. Hint: I have credible neutral “war correspondent” status because I was born in 1974.

[More]

A very clear post that describes the conflict between Boomer and Millennial thinking when it comes to dealing with large amounts of data. Knowledge management (Boomer) is a top-down put the data in the proper bin sort of approach. There are names for each bin and everything needs to fit in the correct one.

Social media (Millennial) uses human social networks in a bottom-up approach that allows the data to determine where it should go. Any bin that it should go into is an emergent property of the network created by the community.

Read the whole post for a nice dissection of what is happening in this War. Just remember that Age is not as important as attitude. There are Boomers who get social media and Millennials who do not.

I think it is that one personality wants things to be black and white (the data is in a database on THIS computer) white the other deals great with shades of gray (the data is in the cloud and not really anyplace).

I did my post-doc in a chemistry lab, the only biologist. I saw something very valuable. Chemistry is very process-driven. The purpose of a process is to reproduce success. If a process, say a particular chemical synthesis, did not work, as in the yield was 10% instead of 90%, it was not the fault of the process. The reagents were bad or the investigator was incompetent. But the process was still valid.

So chemistry selected for people who were very process-driven, wanted things very tightly controlled and well defined.

Biology has a very different regard for process. The same process (say the cloning of a gene) can be done on two different days and get different results (10 colonies of cells one day; 500 the next). Biology is really too complex to be able to control everything. A lot of things can go wrong and it can be really easy to fool oneself with results.

So biology, particularly at the cutting edge, selects for people who can filter out extraneous bits of data, can be comfortable with conditional results and with the general anarchy that can occur. Every molecular biologist has experienced the dreaded ‘everything stops working, so I have to remake every buffer, order new reagents and spend a month trying to figure out what happened, knowing that things will start working again for no real reason.’

Chemists in my post-doc lab hated biology because of the large variance in results, compared to chemistry. Biologists are often happy to be within an order of magnitude of expected results

One way of thinking has to know whether Schrodinger’s cat is dead or alive, while the other is comfortable with knowing it is simultaneously dead and alive.

Biology needs the Millenial approach because it is creating data at too fast a pace to put it all into bins. Social networks can help tremendously with the filters needed to find knowledge in the huge amount of data.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

More information

by blmurch
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Magical Thinking:
[Via FasterCures]
Margaret Anderson, COO, FasterCures

I appreciated the message of Carol Diamond and Clay Shirky’s recent piece in the August 2008 Health Affairs titled “Health Information Technology: A Few Years of Magical Thinking?” In it they say that “proponents of health IT must resist “magical thinking,” such as the notion that isolated work on technology will transform our broken system.” It’s interesting to think about systems change at the front end, and how easy it is to get stars in our eyes about how things like health IT or personalized medicine will transform the world as we know it, and how all of our problems will then magically go away.

The article discusses how it might be easier to implement IT in health if the whole system is redone, rather than bolting on IT. IT will not fix the problems without key changes in how medicine is practiced.

A press release discusses some of their points.

Diamond and Shirky propose an alternative route to using health IT to help transform the U.S. health system. “This alternative approach would focus on a minimal set of standards at first,” they say, and would make utility for the user and improved health outcomes, rather than vendor agreement, the key criteria.

Diamond and Shirky’s alternative approach “would mean working simultaneously on removing other obstacles while concentrating on those standards necessary for sharing the information, however formatted in the short term, to flow between willing and authorized participants. Finally, it would require clear policy statements that will guide the design of technology.”

Sounds like a bottom up approach with the end user driving the technology, rather than health vendors. More from Margaret Anderson:

Cell phones, email, and the Internet have certainly transformed things in ways we couldn’t have imagined, but they’ve introduced problems we couldn’t have imagined. Technologies such as FAX machines have been leapfrogged over. Problems such as the overabundance of information, and the speed of information flow are here to stay it seems. In the case of health IT, FasterCures sees it as a vital bridge to the future of more rapid information collection, characterization, and analysis which could speed our time to cures.

But there needs to be careful attention to the fact that too much information, particularly in the health field, can make it much harder to make accurate decision. eventually we will get the complexity of the system under control but in the meantime, there will be some problems. Faster Cures is examining them.

We are working on a white paper for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about educating and building awareness among consumers about personalized healthcare. This is another area where we must resist “magical thinking” and get down to brass tacks. Too often, the discussion about personalized medicine has been at a 30,000 foot level. For this paper, we’ve talked to many patient advocacy and disease research groups and everyone holds their breath about the potential power that these technologies may hold for their disease areas. They all want more targeted therapies with fewer side effects, which is ultimately the promise of personalized medicine. But they also recognize its complexities. It needs to take into account the world of co-morbidities we all live in; even if baby boomers are out running marathons and eating their greens and blueberries, the reality is that many of us are living with many conditions and diseases, not just one. It will probably raise costs before it can lower them. It’s unlikely many diseases will yield to the relatively easy HER2-Herceptin gene-to-drug relationship. Patients are likely to get much more information about their genetic makeup than they can act on in the near-term.

Health care is still too complex in most cases. The real magical thinking comes in the form of so many fraudulent ‘cures’ that have plagued mankind for thousands of years. Perhaps as we really get IT involved in health, we can begin to gain a fuller understanding of what causes disease and how to attempt a cure.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science, Web 2.0

Helpful

Apple’s bid to change (browser) history:
[Via Buzzworthy]

Apple recently filed for a patent on a radically different way of organizing and navigating your browser history.
[More]

This could really be useful. A more graphically oriented view of history. But I wonder how you get a patent for something like this? Probably why I am not a patent attorney.

Technorati Tags: General, Technology

Browsing for researchers

RSS Reading Habits:
[Via Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media]

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

Photo by Lynetter

I use a RSS reader and read feeds because it is part of my writing process. Lately, my RSS reading habits have changed. I haven’t given up on it completely, but my process has changed. My feeds are organized into folders and the folders ordered by priority. Like a farmer tending his crops, I’d scan through each folder, each feed, bookmarking and annotating what caught my eye, and looking for patterns and connections. This scan, capture, analyze patterns, and write a blog post is a part of my routine.

It still is, but I now use other methods for scanning. It’s more like hanging out in a village square or a pub — conversations, news, and resources come to me. I’m finding new links and posts either through twitter, comments on my blog post, or through people who have linked to me.

So, it’s like I have a left brain, orderly, linear way to scan and a right brain, wildly creative way to scan.

RSS and newsreaders present an incredible set of tools to filter through a lot of information very rapidly. It is like you are directly hooked into to a diverse group of communities in real time. You can see how different items spread through a linked community and drive communication.

And the orderly vs crazy approaches to connecting help one’s own creativity and innovation by interacting with our tacit information, producing the opportunity to alert other communities.

I like how Chris Brogan describes his reading goals.

1. Reading what friends write.
2. Reading about the “new marketing” industry and the tech industry (fishbowl).
3. Reading what people recommend.
4. Reading off the wall stuff that inspires new thoughts (outside the bowl).

This sounds very much like an early adopter, who has connection outside to other media outlets, but uses trusted insiders to decide what things to use.

Michele Martin wrote a post summarizing a paper titled How Knowledge Workers Use the Web and pulls out some the classifications referenced in the paper. My RSS reading is mostly information gathering or browsing.

Finding–Looking for something specific, such as an answer to a specific question.
Information gathering–Less specific than finding, this is research that’s focused on a particular goal that’s broader-based than simply getting a specific piece of information.
Browsing–Visiting personal or professional sites with no specific goal in mind other than to “stay up-to-date” or be entertained.
Transacting–Using the web to execute a transaction, such as banking or shopping.
Communicating–Participating in chat rooms or forums (remember–this was done in 2002, prior to Facebook and the explosive growth of blogs, etc.)
Housekeeping–Using the web to check or maintain the accuracy and functionality of web-based resources, such as looking for dead links, cleaning up outdated information, etc.

One of the major aspects of scientific research and innovation comes from browsing, from reading about something not directly related to a specific problem but which may provide valuable insight for the problem. This used to be relatively easy by doing things like sitting in the library once a week going through the table of contents of all the journals that came in that week, carefully writing down the bibliographic information on note cards, so they could be examined later at leisure.

Serendipity could raise its head. But the Internet made searching so much easier. So too many scientists spend their time on the first step, finding. This is, of course, very important but you will really only find what you are looking for. Serendipity is reduced.

A personal example. Many years ago, I was working on inducing protein production in E. coli from specific gene segments. We typically did this by shifting the temperature, which resulted in the inactivation of a repressor and the expression of the gene.

However, for large scale production (think 1000s of liters) this was not a tenable solution. It was really impossible to raise the temperature of the vessel quick enough to make it a viable solution.

I happened to be reading the Table of Contents of the Journal of Bacteriology and saw a paper which discussed some of the biological effects on the bacteria when the pH of the media was shifted to a more acidic condition. I recognized some of the bacterial proteins involved as being similar to the repressor we used.

So I went out and did some experiments and determined that by dropping the pH, large amounts of the specific protein could be produced. Dropping some acid in a large vessel and stirring quickly can rapidly expose all the cells to the same conditions and induce protein production.

But it could also be done under some different conditions, resulting in up to 15 times more recombinant protein being produced.

So, for me, the really important aspect of RSS/newsreaders is bringing browsing back. Every journal has newsfeeds now. I can typically go through several thousand titles in an hour, bookmark the ones I want to examine later and even post the links to a blog, where I can add comments.

My blog becomes my online note card file for interesting articles.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

Public Mark Up Needed on Bailout Bills

Public Mark Up Needed on Bailout Bills:
[Via Burnt Orange Report]

Public Mark Up has the first two pieces of actual legislation floating around to fix our economic plight.

The Treasury Department (read Paulson) proposal is here.  Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee has his proposal here.

Public Mark Up is taking comments, thoughts, and notes on each section of each proposal.  Take a look, and please post first, second, third, and fourth thoughts here (and there).

Participate in democracy. Add some comments or insights into the current Democratic bill, as well as the Administration’s. I would guess that the Congressional Republican’s plan is just to say no to whichever.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Where I’ve been?

I’ve been working on more marketing materials for the seminar – Transformed! Information, Bioscience and Web 2.0. You can see it below.

I worked on this last week. It is shown here as a handout to be posted. I also printed them out as a postcard with the two section printed on each side. I have 200 cards made up and have distributed about 150. I It was actually fun.

Technorati Tags: Biology, Science, Social media, Web 2.0

As Always

by tanakawho
[Crossposted on SpreadingScience]
Digital intimacy:
[Via Bench Marks]

Recently, the NY Times had an article discussing the concept of “ambient awareness”, or as the article puts it, “incessant online contact”. Now, first off, I have to admit that I’m one of the over-30-year-olds the article mentions, who finds the concept of subjecting others to (and being subjected to) a stream of trivial details about one’s day completely unappealing. The proponents of Twitter and FriendFeed and the like feel that they’re getting a more intimate understanding of people, “something raw about my friends,” as one user puts it. I’m more in line with the critics quoted in the article that the end result is more “parasocial” than social, and that it ends up an extension of reading gossip magazines and following celebrities from afar.
So how do these new practices apply to the world of science research?
[More]

David always brings up really good points to discuss. I don’t expect every scientist will want or need to be a direct part of the ‘conversation’ happening on Twiiter or FriendFeed. Few have the time. But it will be important that the social network (ie. lab, department, etc.) they belong to includes people who are connected.

These tools are rapidly becoming a part of how human communities disperse information. This decreases the diameter of a social network tremendously, meaning information of every type has to traverse fewer nodes.

Research networks that normally involved publications, seminars, conferences, etc. will also include these social media approaches. Because labs that remain unconnected will not be able to compete with labs that do use these tools to decrease the diameter of their sphere of collaborations and fid out about relevant information faster.

These tools are just part of finding out what is happening in relevant fields. I’ll give an example of how these tools can help move information in ways not possible before.

I had looked a little bit at FriendFeed but just did not have the time to really dig. Then I noticed that there were a lot of hits at my website that were being referred from the Science 2.0 room.

Turns out they were having a conversation about my site and were asking a lot of questions, trying to get an idea of who I was , my reputation, etc. Seeing the conversation, I quickly joined and helped answer questions. Now I am a part of a group I can check in on every so often that does a great job finding and providing information I find useful.

Like any social setting, I introduced myself, answered some questions and provided insight. Now I am connected to a group that provides very useful information for me.
I don’t have to check it constantly to be able to see useful items that I would not have if I were not part of this particular conversation.

Human social networks are exceptionally great filters of information. The huge amounts of information being created today require human networks to help filter and disperse the info. These tools are simply one part.

All that will really be necessary is for a scientist just to be part of a research network, even just a lab, in which someone is connected to these online sites. What is important is the rate at which this information diffuses throughout the group, not that everyone in the group is connected to Twitter.

Each person in a network often has their own role, their own diverse viewpoint that helps the group. The best tools will be ones that allow people to use them for their own purposes and needs. They do not work by forcing everyone to join.

But they do work by spreading information farther and faster.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Pass it on

by d70focus
Angry Bear: Your Urgent Help Needed:
[Via Angry Bear]
Your Urgent Help Needed
Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a
transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had
crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion
dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most
profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my
replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may
know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the
1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds
as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names
of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family
lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person
who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account
numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to
wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for
this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with
detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the
funds.
Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Technorati Tags: Government, Politics

Drugs in the water

Dolphins on drugs:
[Via Discovery News: Deep Sea News]

by Peter Etnoyer

What do you think happens to all the caffeine, cumadin, and Xanax people take every morning? They go into wastewater. How about the expired and unused pills? They go down the drain, get flushed down the toilet. And where do they end up? In dolphins and fish in your bay.

New investigative research published in the Olympian estimates American hospitals and long-term care facilities flush 250 million pounds of pharmaceuticals and contaminated packaging down the drain each year. This is corroborated by federal studies.

In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found these pharmaceutical contaminants in 80 percent of the 139 streams sampled in 30 states. Mark Powell at Blogfish links to a couple interesting stories, including one with a solution called “Smart Disposal: a prescription for a healthy planet”.

“So what,” you say. “Will the fish easier to catch now that they’re stoned and hungry?”. Could be.

One lecture I heard last year by researchers out of Charleston, SC demonstrated that drugged fish show decreased reaction times to natural predators. This won’t make it easier for you to catch them. It will make it easier for their predators to catch them, so… none for you. To me, this story represents the intersection of science, health, and the environment. It’s an emerging issue.

We need to push for our community hospitals and long-term care facilities to limit and track pharmaceutical disposals. We don’t want our kids on drugs, much less swimming in them. Remember, wastewater is a municipal problem. The USGS can survey, and the EPA can regulate, but its up to the counties and the states to implement better practices. Make it an issue in your community.

The foundation I am on the board of (Seattle Biotech Legacy Foundation) looked into this. There are some very strong laws to prevent the easy collection and disposal of pharmaceuticals. Not just at heathcare facilities but also from private homes. One of the groups we have worked with is the Washington Citizens for Resource Conservation, which is trying to set up secured boxes at pharmacies for disposing of drugs safely.

The huge amount of pharmaceuticals that many animals may be exposed to is a very real concern. Our drug habit has the potential of relly disrupting ecosystems to a greater extent than CO2 production.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Health, Science

A five step process

I’ve mentioned some of the work by Everett Rogers on technology adoption. The bell curve seen refers to the adoption of innovations by a community. But what about individuals? Is there a process whereby they adopt new technology?

Turns out there is. You can read the work by George Beal and Joe Bohlen in 1957. There is a five step path that each individual appears to go through, although some people are slower to transition between steps.

1. Awareness. The individual is simply aware the innovation exists.
2. Interest. The individual wants more information. They begin to wonder if the innovation can help them.
3. Evaluation. The individual mentally examines the innovation using the information gathered, trying to determine whether it will really impact their work.
4. Trial. The individual actually tests the innovation to see if reality matches expectations.
5. Adoption. The individual likes the innovation and adopts it wholeheartedly.

Beal and Bohlen also described what sources of information were used at each stage. Through the first two, mass media and government agencies were most important.

This was really an attempt to get an ‘unbiased’ viewpoint since friends and salesmen (saesmen always came in last) were the next two sources. But for the last 3 stages, neighbors and friends were the largest source of information, moreso than any other group.

So, early in the diffusion process, unbiased experts are sought. But when the evaluation process is started, the experiences of close ties within a local social network become the most important. For most people, the opinions and personal experiences of their friends are most important for adoption of a new innovation than any external source.

Now the innovators in a community race through these steps. They often are connected to outside groups and use social interactions unavailable to others in the community to more rapidly move through the last 3 steps.

The early adopters take information from the innovators and use their own connections to move through the stages, not as fast as the innovators, but with reasonable speed.

But it is the majority of the community that relies on the early adopters and innovators within the community to inform themselves. Research has shown that they require much more information from trusted sources within the community than innovators and early adopters. Without this information from peers, they will not progress rapidly through the last 3 stages.

The laggards are the slowest to move through the 5 stages. They do not trust most outside sources, so the awareness and interest stages are slowed. Plus they will only listen to certain trusted sources within the community. Until those trusted sources make their own way through the 5 stages, the laggards will not progress.

So, to alter the rate of diffusion of innovation in a community, increased lines of communication must be available, increasing the information that can be provided to individuals.This helps with the first 2 steps. but mostly only for the 16% of the community at the left side of the curve.

However, of greatest importance are the connections between members within the community, particularly the thought-leaders found in the early adopters. About 70% of a community will not adopt new innovations unless they hear clear reasons why, from trusted individuals within the community.

No amount of salesmanship or external proof will easily move them. But, tgiven he right opinion from a community thought-leader and they will rapidly make the transition.

This is an area that Web 2.0 technologies can be of real value. Not only do they make it easier for members of a community to disburse information, they also help the community more accurately identify who is in each group, permitting more focused, explicit approaches to be used to move individuals through the 5 steps.

The thought-leaders can more rapidly progress through the stages and can extend their opinions much more rapidly to the majority because they are not required to be in the same place at the same time as the others in the group. Thus there will be more opportunities for their viewpoints to be assimilated by the majority.

Increasing the rate of diffusion of innovation in a community really means increasing the speed with which each individual progresses through the 5 step.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

About Foxes

Fantastic Mr Fox:
[Via Catalogue of Organisms]

The Tibetan fox (Vulpes ferrilata), a distinctive fox species restricted to the Tibetan Plateau. Photo from the BBC via Lioncrusher’s Domain.

Foxes are a widespread assemblage of canid predators, found through most of the Holarctic and drier Africa and also here in Australia, where the red fox Vulpes vulpes was introduced quite successfully. Too successfully, in fact – foxes are one of the most significant invasive species in Australia, and a dire threat to many native species. Of the slightly more than ten species in the fox genus Vulpes, the red fox is undoubtedly the most familiar, being both the most widespread species overall as well as the most abundant in developed countries. However, the familiarity of the red fox is a little misleading, as Vulpes vulpes is actually one of the more distinctive species in the genus, being considerably larger and arguably more dog-like than other foxes.
[More]

Nice discussion of foxes, especially about the uncertainty of how the different species fit together. And the last paragraph is particularly eye opening.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

An announcement

by hendriko
Something from my day job.

All the details have been finalized for a three hour seminar SpreadingScience is sponsoring entitled

Transformed! Information, Bioscience and Web 2.0

October 7, 2008 6-9 PM
Lake Washington Rowing Club
910 N. Northlake Way
Seattle WA

The seminar will be given by Richard Gayle, Ph.D. and Mark Minie, Ph.D. It is geared for a general audience that includes researchers, lawyers, clinicians and anyone else interested in using modern technology to solve today’s problems. It will have three segments:

1. The Transformation of Information into Knowledge
   Knowledge is the ability to make a decision, to perform an action. The knowledge creation cycle begins with data. Human social interactions transform data into knowledge. Social networks evolved to provide primates with diverse solutions to complex problems. However, there appear to be hardwired barriers to the size of these social networks, limiting the scope and complexities of the problems that can be solved. The huge amount of information being generated overwhelms these barriers. The difficult problems facing us today are too complex to be solved only the tools we evolved. We must use new digital tools to amplify our inherent abilities.
2. The Transformation of Bioscience by Information
   Biology is now a branch of Information Science, and important new research, discovery and invention is taking place on the World Wide Web. From computer gaming/education to personal genomics, biological engineering and robotics, bioscience is undergoing a true renaissance with previously unexpected impact and dividends. This segment will explore bioscience’s new life on the Internet. It will focus on specific examples and new tools with potential practical uses for both scientists and non-scientists alike.
3. The Web 2.0 Transformation
   Web 2.0 is about online conversations. These tools often remove the need for people to occupy the same space at the same time in order to transform information into knowledge. They permit the examination and understanding of human social networks many times larger than our hardwired limits. This enhances the ability to create knowledge and to increase the rate of diffusion of information in an organization. Communities that can use Web 2.0 tools to leverage human social networks will solve complex problems more rapidly than those that do not.

There is a glut of data in the world today. Our normal processes to deal with this glut – the interactions in a human social network – are overwhelmed. However, the same technologies that are permitting such huge amount of data to be created can also help us enhance our social network interactions, providing organizations with the possibility of sloving much more complex problems than before.

Please join us on October 7 as we provide a foundation for understanding how Bioscience is being transformed by information and how we can use novel tools to leverage this transformation into critical solutions .

Until September 23, the cost is $175. After that date it rises to $225. So register early!

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

Busy

by HiggySTFC

Sorry for being away for a couple of days. I have been putting the final touches on an exciting event that I have been working on. I hope to have an announcement soon.

Technorati Tags: General

A better yeast?

by pointnshoot
Brewing better beer: Scientists determine the genomic origins of lager yeasts:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

Yeast, the essential microorganism for fermentation in the brewing of beer, converts carbohydrates into alcohol and other products that influence appearance, aroma, and taste. In a study published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), researchers have identified the genomic origins of the lager yeast Saccharomyces pastorianus, which could help brewers to better control the brewing process.

[More]

Very nice. Ale yeast, the ‘original’ is a top fermenting yeast, while lager is a bottom-fermenting. Because of these characteristics, lagers are more easily produced for mass consumption but usually do not have the taste complexities found in ales. ALes can also be easily produced at room temperatures while lagers need cooler temps.

This looks like an interesting report, with the mystery of where lager yeast came from being closer to a solution. What I found really interesting is that the yeast from different breweries looked like they had been under selective pressure for that specific brewery.

So it may not just be the water that makes the same brand of beer produced at different sites to taste differently. The yeast may actually be diverging at the two sites.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science