It’s amazing to me that fetal DNA floats free in the mother’s blood

Scientists Confirm: Blood Test Can Tell A Fetus’s Sex at Seven Weeks
[Via 80beats]

What’s the News: A blood test can reliably tell a mother-to-be whether to expect a boy or girl as early as seven weeks into pregnancy, according to a new analysis published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The test can distinguish the sex of a fetus up to three months earlier than an ultrasound can, and doesn’t carry the slight risk of miscarriage that accompanies invasive tests such as amniocentesis.

How the Heck:

The test works by detecting tiny bits of fetal DNA floating through an expectant mom’s bloodstream. In particular, the test looks for little fragments of a Y chromosome, which only males have. Some Y chromosome DNA in the blood sample means it’s a boy; none means it’s a girl. Of course, this method isn’t perfect. The test could fail to recognize a minute amount of male DNA in a sample, or mistakenly detect a bit of a Y chromosome where there isn’t. So, the researchers set out to determine just how accurate this test was. They analyzed all the data from 57 previous studies of the technique, looking at a combined total of more …

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The numbers look really good. About 10% of the DNA found floating free in a pregnant woman comes from the fetus. And this DNA has a turnover time in days, so it is unlikely to come from any other source. In fact, using the free floating DNA is more accurate than trying to use any fetal cells found in the blood.

Using Y chromosome specific sequences, the tests were able to identify male fetuses. If there was no male fetus DNA found, the fetus turned out to be female.

The sensitivity and specificity of these tests approach 99% accurate. in addition, it appears that chromosomal abnormalities and genetic defects will easily be able to be determined.

For couples with possible genetic factors underlying their pregnancy, these technologies could offer great hope.

The innocent can easily be made to falsely confess

by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos

Why Do the Innocent Confess?
[Via 80beats]

In the justice system, a confession is often treated as proof of guilt—and yet, a surprising number of people confess to crimes they didn’t commit. In its latest issue, the Economist reviews recent research showing just how frequently innocent people ‘fess up, and what factors lead them to do it.

When an experimenter falsely accused subjects of crashing a computer, 25% of them confessed even though they’d done nothing wrong, one study found. If the accusation was corroborated by a (lying) eyewitness, that number jumped to 80%. In another study, participants falsely accused of cheating on a task were told that authority figures were processing evidence that could prove their guilt—in this case, a tape. Half the people confessed, even though they must have known the tape recorded their actual, innocent behavior. This is particularly worrying because police often use this same tactic when waiting to get DNA or fingerprint results.

While the situations—research subject vs. crime suspect—are of course quite different, the parallels are enough to give one pause.

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I’ll remember this the next time I am on jury duty. 50% or more confessing to something they did not do is really high. In one test, 10% of the people did not cheat but admitted to cheating even when told that there would be a $72 fine for cheating.

And the numbers go up even higher when the ‘interrogator’ is allowed to lie and present false evidence – something allowed in the US but not in the UK. When this is done, the numbers of false confessions rise to 80%.

But why do they confess? Interviews suggested that some felt they would be exonerated in the end and signed the confessions just to stop an uncomforatble situation.

Man, what happens to someone interrogated for hours in a closed room by people that can lie? A big reason why you should never talk to the police without a lawyer

If you make a living copying people’s ideas in order to sell ads, then of course you’ll hate IP rights

Google asserts that Intellectual Property rights are anti-competitive
[Via MacDailyNews]

Google recently complained in a blog post called When patents attack Android that it is the victim of a vast anti-competitive conspiracy to enforce property-rights against Google’s fast-growing Android mobile operating platform. Google goes on to charge that competitors are wielding ‘bogus patents’ ‘as a weapon to stop’ Google’s innovation. Google specifically is complaining it is anti-competitive that a group of some of its competitors outbid Google to own Nortel’s roughly 6,000 patents,” Scott Cleland writes for Forbes.

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Google is all about IP rights and secrecy when it serves its own purposes but indignantly against them when it does not.

Not very surprising but I just loved the last line quoted from the article:

Arguably no other Fortune 500 company has ever been more hostile to others’ property rights than Google.

A business model where you copy other’s ideas and then use them to sell ads may make billions but is not really susutainable for the rest of us.

Just remember, Google’s customers are its advertisors so it will do whatever it can to increase the ad revenue while spending as little as possible.

I want to work for Disney

iPads aid Disney’s Imagineers in expansion of Magic Kingdom
[Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

Disney has posted a pretty cool video that shows how their “Imagineers” are using iPads to monitor and make changes to the New Fantasyland at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Using proprietary Disney software on the iPad, which allows Imagineers to view and manipulate a 3D digital rendering of Fantasyland, the Imagineers can communicate with the engineers and contractors working in the field to immediately see if any conflicts of design vs. practicality emerge.

If there are any conflicts, the contractors can use the iPad’s built-in cameras to photograph or record the areas in question. If there’s a conversation to be had, they can kick off meetings right on the spot with Cisco’s WebEx for iPad software. Check out the video below to see the whole process as well as some cool behind-the-scenes footage of how a theme park is built. It’s wonderful to see Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” device helping create magical and fantastic places.

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This looks like such a cool job. Using iPads to make sure what happens in the field is what was designed, and then having ad hoc meetings to work out problems should provide tremendous productivity gains. Subcontractors work in an entirely different way with all the design workers.

We will see more of this as mobile devices and wireless transmissions become ubiquitous.

Think how much energy we could save if we legalized marijuana!

by warrantedarrest

Marijuana growers use 1 percent of electricity in US.
[Via Dave Winer's linkblog feed]

Marijuana growers use 1 percent of electricity in US.

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All those grow lights indoors uses a lot of juice. But legalize it and the plants could be moved outside, reducing the energy costs a lot.

So, legalize marijuana to help the environment.

How Google lawyers have undercut one of its primary marketing bullet points

by tribalicious

Android Fail English? That’s Unpossible.
[Via Daring Fireball]

Gregg Keizer, reporting for Computerworld:

In a motion filed with the ITC Wednesday, Google asked that Robert Stevenson, an expert hired by Microsoft, be barred from testifying about the Android source code at an upcoming hearing because Microsoft violated a confidentiality agreement struck between Microsoft, Motorola and Google.

According to Google, Microsoft did not ask permission before showing Stevenson the Android source code. […]

“The confidential source code improperly provided to Dr. Stevenson is highly proprietary source code that Google does not even share with its partners, such as Motorola,” Google said.

But it’s open!

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It’s hard to claim how open an operating system is when you have code so secret and propretary that partners are not even allowed to see it.

Seems to me that code that require permission to see is not really open at all.