No laptops across borders

by AMagill
Electronic Search and Seziure at the Border:
[Via Group News Blog]

So, any laptop entering the US can be confiscated, held for several weeks, and completely copied, all because a Customs Agent wants to. I would figure a lot of businesses are going to be very unhappy with this approach. As GNB says:

As of April, Customs can take every electronic device you have.

US News and World Reports

Returning from a vacation to Germany in February, freelance journalist Bill Hogan was selected for additional screening by customs officials at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Agents searched his luggage, he said, “then they told me that they were impounding my laptop.”

Shaken by the encounter, Hogan examined his bags and found the agents had also inspected the memory card from his camera. “It was fortunate that I didn’t use [the laptop] for work,” he said, “or I would have had to call up all my sources and tell them that the government had just seized their information.” When customs offered to return the computer nearly two weeks later, Hogan had it shipped to his lawyer.

How common Hogan’s experience is remains unclear. But an April ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection, does have full authority to search any electronic devices without suspicion in the same way that it can inspect briefcases.

But congressional investigators say that copies of drives are sometimes made, meaning customs could be duplicating corporate secrets, legal and financial data, personal E-mails and photographs, along with stored passwords for accounts with companies ranging from Netflix to Bank of America.

The practice of storing and duplicating material might be something that both opponents and supporters of seizure could agree to regulate, says Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, an otherwise staunch supporter of customs’ authority. Larry Cunningham, an assistant district attorney from New York, told the hearing: “I am aware of no authority that would permit the government, without probable cause to believe it contains contraband, to keep a person’s laptop or to copy the contents of its files.”

Customs insists that terrorism and child pornography are sufficient justification for electronics searches. And even civil libertarians agree it makes sense for customs to search luggage, which could pose immediate dangers to aircraft and passengers. But, says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, “customs officials do not go through briefcases to review and copy paper business records or personal diaries, which is apparently what they are now doing in digital form. These pda’s don’t have bombs in them.”

Customs doesn’t make copies of the files in your briefcase. For them to copy the files on your computer is to turn over one’s life to the government.

How are you supposed to get any work done? And can Customs hold your briefcase for a couple of weeks and copy everything in it? This seems like way beyond unreasonable search and seizure. It also seems really open to abuse. Corporate espionage got a lot more interesting, I guess. I would expect businessman to be a little worried about this.

Technorati Tags: Government

Phoenix speaks to me

by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

I made the picture bigger so you can see. The ice is in the lower left of the trench, in shadow. The blowups make it easier to see.

Yes, there’s ice on Mars : Nature News:
[Via Nature]

“Whoohoo! Was keeping my eye on some chunks of bright stuff & they disappeared! Sublimated! So it can’t be salt, it’s ice.” That’s the triumphant verdict of the Mars lander Phoenix, which yesterday boldly declared, after 24 Martian days of scratching the planet’s surface, that yes, there is ice on Mars.

Phoenix is constantly sending back information to Earth, which is posted by the mission team using the instant messaging software Twitter (written, in touchy-feely style, in the first person as if Phoenix itself is providing its own commentary on its labours). Twitter, the ‘microblogging’ phenomenon, can thus claim to have brought the watery news to Earthlings’ attention.
[More]

There are a lot of reasons to be happy to be alive today. The Phoenix on Mars is one of those. There are so many things we are going to learn because we were able to land this vehicle on Mars.

But OhMiGod!! I can read what Phoenix (or the humans behind it) is up to by going to its site on Twitter. If I am out and about and Phoenix discovers life on Mars, it will tell me via Twitter. I can be one of almost 25,000 followers of what Phoenix is doing now. here are the three most recent Tweets it has sent as of 12 on Friday the 20th:

• Briefing starting now at www.nasa.gov/newsaudio. It will also be avail later today on recorded line at 800-873-2093 about 2 hours ago from web
• CO2 vs. H20 ice: Temp too high and pressure too low for CO2 ice. Sci team explains at 10a PDT/1p EDT live audio here: www.nasa.gov/newsaudio. about 2 hours ago from web
• Kudos go to the science and engineering teams that sent me here. Great choice of spots. The cool news is here too at www.nasa.govphoenix/. about 18 hours ago from web

This is just too precious. Twitter rocks, even when it is not working well ;-)

Technorati Tags: Technology

Some bumps in the road

by jurvetson
Your SNPs are your information:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

A quick follow up to my previous post. Reading Rob Carlson’s wonderfully written post on the C&Ds sent out by the California Department of Public Health to 13 consumer genetics companies got me thinking. He writes

There appears to be some tension between the interpretation of tests ordered for diagnostic purposes, which probably should require a prescription, and sequencing or genotyping services that provide information about a consumer’s genetic makeup.
[More}

There is a really interesting conversation going on about various genotyping companies and their interaction with the California Department of Public Health. There are some real questions about its jurisdiction and some people really wonder why doctors have to be involved. (i.e. Pay the cost of a doctor's visit to get a prescription to have my own DNA examined. That sounds odd? Why can't I just send in a cheek swab?)

Some of this also seems to run afoul of the state's consumer protection focus. Again, this seems a little odd but I guess a point could be made to apply some sort of precautionary principle (i.e. the companies need to demonstrate that they are able to accurately produce a genotype with a very low level of errors) since it is likely that a large percentage of the people using the services may view the results as something more than just informational. Look what happened to Alec Guinness when he was given incorrect information regarding a medical condition.

Having been doing molecular biology since the the late 70s, I know that these techniques are not necessarily an exact science. What level of redundancy will be needed? What are the error rates? How good are the microarray chips used? What are the verified QA/QC procedures and who does the verification? The results had better have a high degree of accuracy.

I was interested in the accuracy of the chips used by these genotyping services. I am basing the following on my own research experience and what is actually written on the web sites. If i have made some fundamental error, please let me know. It would not be the first time I went off on a ragged trail to be brought up by a fatal assumption. But I think I have done the math right.

The important use for 23andme is the generation of a very deep and rich database that can be used to find linkages between important genes and SNPs. The accuracy of an individual's sample is not strictly that important for this purpose since the law of large numbers means any individual errors will be swamped out. But individual errors in an individual's sample may be important for that individual (Yes, I am channeling Po from Kung Fu Panda - 'Legend tells of a legendary warrior whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend'. Or Criswell from Plan 9 from Outer Space - 'And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.')

I had to do a little digging to get some numbers but 23andme claims a call rate that averages 99%, meaning that 1% of the SNPs can not be called. With nearly 600,000 SNPs to look at, this means that 6000 SNPs are not called in a single sample. But that is based on an average. Without knowing the standard deviation, it is possible that some samples will have much higher 'No call' rates. So someone who might have a SNP linked to an important trait would not know that they had it.

While there is no data given for what percentage of incorrect calls are made, they do say that reproducibility is 99.9%, so that if the sample is run again 99.9% of the information will be the same. (I would assume this also means that the 6000 'No Calls' are also 'No Calls' the second time.) So, for 600 SNPs in an individual sample there will be an ambiguity.

Is this a problem? I really do not know, not being an expert. For a research database that will be examining thousands of genomes, this may all be irrelevant. There will be some redundancy from the power of large numbers. The 'noise' from errors will be swamped out by the overall SNPs called. So it would be possible to find links between SNPs and phenotypes with this level of error.

But, for individuals who will examine their own data, this could be a little more problematic. Using my rough rule of thumb from all those years I did Poisson distributions, in a group of about 3000 samples, there is a greater than 90% chance that there will be at least one ambiguity (error?) for every one of the 600,000 SNPs on the chip. So if say there was a SNP that tracked an important phenotype, such as Alzheimer's, someone in that group would most likely get the wrong information.

And in a group of about 300 people, there will be a 'no call' for every SNP when there should be a call. So while each individual would have a low probability of having an error in their data, it is very likely that someone in the group will have a error at an important SNP.

Like the lottery, the chances are low of 'winning' but you can be assured that someone will 'win.'

Of course, they would not know they had 'won.' And considering that 23andme claims to have performed 10 billion genotypes since 2007, there are a lot of individual samples with important errors. Not important if you are creating a database of 10 billion genotypes but it might be of some concern to an individual.

I understand the principles behind all of this and recognize the extreme scientific importance of such a database. But I do not believe the average person does. In 1988, 21% of the people surveyed thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. Similar numbers were seen in 1999. Only 47% of the people answered correctly said that it takes a year for the Earth to go around the Sun. Only half the people in one survey understood probabilities (which explains the popularity of lotteries). This is from last year:

The most recent National Science Foundation Science Indicators report draws on different surveys to tell us that only about 54 percent of Americans realize that antibiotics do not kill viruses, fewer than half know that genetically modified foods are in their neighborhood grocery store, and only 44 percent believe that human beings developed from other animal species (about three-quarters of those responding realize that the theory of evolution says this, but many reject the theory).

Indeed, more people believe that houses can be haunted than accept the theory of the Big Bang, and 29 percent are not certain that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. (my emphasis)

Now sometimes I think we really are headed towards Idocracy but not everyone has the time or inclination to understand the ramifications of what they are doing when they engage biotech. (I have had so many dinner conversations about genetically modified foods. I sometimes feel like my father having to explain the oil industry, where he worked as an exploration geologist for 30 years, to those who do not understand its complexity. Although I think people have a greater visceral fear of 'Frankenfoods' than they do of OPEC )

But these same people make real life decisions based on the results of a 23andme scan. They do not have the time nor ability to understand deeply what the results really mean (at least the 50% that do not understand probabilities). How many errors are usually present? What does level of confidence really mean?Which companies are really legit and which are just jumping on a money-making opportunity? Few people are able to figure this out. (23andme does an excellent job trying to provide this information, though.)

That is why the American people have designated surrogates in the government to do this for them. Thus the FDA, or the California Department of Public Health. They attempt to bring some sort of validation to very complex processes.

I mean, I know that those 'natural' pills will have no real effect on my prowess, no matter how big a smile that guy has. But apparently lots of people believed him. While caveat emptor applies, these sorts of companies are hit all the time with fines and notices by the FDA. The makers of Enzyte apparently defrauded people of $100 million! Its president, his mother and others were found guilty. He may have to serve 20 years in prison, yet the company's web site is still there, it looks like you can still buy Enzyte and all they are doing is mulling whether they should change their name.

So there is a role for some sort of oversight here and I would expect these companies to welcome some. Now the key question is really who should do the overseeing? I would prefer a Federal group rather than a state but, just as we seem to need New York Attorneys General to go after high tech companies, there may be a need for states to intercede if no Federal one will.

[Lest anyone think I am picking on 23andme, they are the epitome of an open site, providing all the information I needed and obviously stating in very open and transparent terms exactly what is going on. They appear to possess as much integrity as any organization I can find out about online. The main benefit of 23andme is the database being generated. They are open about sharing this information for research pirposes. Their blog is a constant source of very interesting science. I would not hesitate in giving them a sample because I would not care at all what the results really were. My sample really helps them more than it helps me. I actually kind of like their mission, but I am a well-educated guy who knows that the Earth goes around the Sun in a year. I am not an average customer.]

Of course, this is another example of the rapidly changing world hitting up against regulations that were developed for something completely different. It took some time for DNA fingerprinting techniques to be readily accepted and even then individual labs screw up without proper oversight. While I do not believe the same sorts of consequences to arise from genotyping, I expect that oversight will be worked out because the technology is just too easy to use.

This collision of old and new smacks of the similar problems copyright has when dealing with the digital world. The game has changed and bureaucracies that were created to deal with old style medicine will have to learn how to deal with this newfangled biotech. Because it is likely that in just a few years, it will be possible to sequence a person’s entire genome in perhaps a single day for under $1000.

Garage Biotech will really be in full swing. How will the California Department of Public Health deal with that?!

Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Biology, Health, Science, Technology

A better idea?

Airlines are charging for the wrong bags :
[Via Yahoo News]
Instead of charging for checked bags, which will just lead to people trying to carry on everything they can, he suggests that they should charge for carry ons and give people the choice.

This would be a better idea for families and what not but I don’t see airlines implementing this. Their argument would be that weight has a fuel cost and that checked bags have greater fuel costs than carry ons.

So I figure their next point will be to weigh everyone before boarding and charge an extra fee for those who weigh more than they plan for. If they could find a way to do this that is not discriminatory I bet they would implement it.

Technorati Tags: General, Government

Helping people change

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

In Pursuit Of Process Change:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

I was discussing with one of our execs the progress we’d been making on social media proficiency internally.

And he asked a great question that made me think:

“So, has anyone fundamentally changed their work processes because of the platform?”

And I realized this is the next frontier on what’s turning out to be a large-scale social engineering project.

Getting Business Value Out Of Our Social Software

As we make progress in this journey, I’ve got my eye out for different catagories of business value we’re seeing.  I suppose, at the same time, I should also be keeping my eye out for business value we’re NOT seeing yet.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re seeing business value — in many forms — across the board:

People with specific interests are finding other people with similar interests
Rather than searching big content repositories, people are asking other people for help and answers
A pan-organizational “social fabric” has been created that wasn’t really there before
Folks who spend time on the platform are better educated — and more engaged — in EMC’ business

And more And, just to be clear, there’s no shortage of business benefits — I still stand behind the broad assertion that this has been one of the most ROI-positive IT projects I’ve seen in my career.

Interesting “value nugget” of the week: 

EMC runs a healthy program to bring a large number of interns and co-op students into the company.  They started introducing themselves to each other on the platform.

What started with “name, rank, serial number” blossomed into a wonderfully diverse set of conversations about careers, favorite hangouts, what it means to work at EMC, what is everybody doing, and so on.

I would argue that — whatever millions that EMC spends on this intern/coop program — we’ve now made it 10-20% more valuable, simply because we connected people to each other, and connected them all to the broader company. 

At zero incremental cost.

But we want more. Much more.
[More]

Right up front EMC can demonstrate easily how new technologies save money and create new opportunities. The problem comes from actually getting people to use the technologies.

Many companies are process-driven. If the process is working, why change? Of course, buggy whip manufacturers probably had a great process also. But if they did not change, they disappeared.

What is driving the world more and more is the rate at which innovations diffuse through an organization. This is a fascinating subject because there are also some hard data behind it, some of it generated over 70 years ago.

Using the rate of adoption of hybrid corn by farmers in the early 1930s, Ryan and Gross were to derive some very important insights. These two researchers interviewed 345 farmers in Iowa about their use of hybrid corn, when the farmers first heard about it and when they started using it.

Here is a figure from their classic paper ‘The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities’. Even though the hybrid corn had many important advantages it took almost 13 years for this innovation to diffuse throughout the entire community. The actual adoption curve (from their 1943 paper) is compared with a normal distribution curve (in black).

If the data are plotted as the cumulative adoption of the innovation, it looked like this:

Both of these types of curves have been seen again and again when the diffusion of innovation is examined. They seem to be derived from basic forces present in human social networks.

Ryan and Gross made several key contributions besides the identification of the S-shaped curve. One was the process by which the innovation diffused. The other was the type of farmer who used the innovation.

They found that there were five stages in the adoption of an innovation by an individual: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. And there were at least 4 different types of farmers, of which the early adopters were the most important.

Early adopters heard about the corn from traveling salesmen and tried small plots to see how well it worked. Later adopters relied on the personal experience of other farmers, usually the early adopters. When there were enough positive reactions from the early adopters, when there were more stories of personal experience, the adoption rate took off.

It was the human social network that was critical for the rate at which the innovation was adopted. The more social connections an early adopter had, the more cosmopolitan they were, the more likely it would be that others would adopt use of the innovation.

Everett Rogers was instrumental in codifying many of the principles of innovation diffusion. Here is his famous rendition of the distribution:

Only 16% of a population is usually made up of the early adopters, the ones that are critical for spreading the innovation to the early majority. The key to the adoption of any innovation is the rate at which early adopters can transmit the knowledge of the benefits to the early majority. In the case of the farmers, it would often take 4 or more years for this to be converted form awareness to adoption.

In many areas of our world today, this is much too slow. Technology is disruptive, meaning that the people who adopt this technology actually deal with the world in entirely different ways than those who do not. It is similar to a paradigm shift, in that those on either side of the shift have a hard time communicating with each other. It is almost as if they inhabit separate worlds.

This can cause some problems because the early adopters are required to communicate with the early majority if an innovation is to diffuse throughout an organization. If they can not, it creates a chasm, which has been described by Geoffrey Moore in his book.

The organization has to take strong action to recognize that this chasm is present and to span it, either with training or, more effectively, with people who have been specially designated as chasm spanners. In many cases using Web 2.0 technologies, they are called online community managers.

Disruptive innovations seem to arrive almost yearly. Without a directed and defined process to increase the rate of diffusion in an organization, if just standard channels of communication are used, innovation will diffuse at too slow a rate for many organizations to remain competitive.

Because there is usually not just one innovation disrupting an organization at a time. Life is not that clean. There can be multiple innovations coursing through different departments, moving early adopters even further away from the rest of the group and expanding the chasm. This only makes communication harder.

So, a key aspect of being able to increase the rate of diffusion is to create a process where early adopters are identified and strong communication channels are created to permit them to pass information to the early majority.

It can no longer be possible to simply let the early adopters go through their 5 stages of adoption and then tell others about it at the water cooler. Designated online community managers, with the training needed to enhance communication channels, will be critical in getting this information dispersed throughout an organization.

Organizations need to take pro-active approaches to span the chasm. Otherwise they will lose out to the organizations that do take such approaches.

Identifying and nurturing the 16% of the organization that are early adopters will be critical for this process. Having community managers who are well embedded in the social structure of the organizations will also be needed to help increase the rates of innovation diffusion.

No wonder

by blakespot
Why is the FEC Using TRS-80’s?:
[Via Balloon Juice]

Am I not understanding this:

The record-shattering fundraising by Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has reshaped the financing of presidential elections and generated breathless coverage and analysis of the otherwise arcane area of campaign finance.

Yet it’s had another consequence that has gone all but unnoticed. The campaign finance reports filed by Obama and Clinton have grown so massive that they’ve strained the capacity of the Federal Election Commission, good government groups, the media and even software applications to process and make sense of the data.

A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel 2003 and Lotus 1-2-3.

Those programs can’t download data files with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns.

***

If you want to comb through Obama or Clinton’s cash, you either need to divide and import their reports section-by-section (a time-consuming and mind-numbing process) or purchase a more powerful database application, such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel 2007, both of which retail for $229.

The FEC can’t afford a copy of Excel 2007? I can lend them my laptop if they need, but they better not talk while I am watching BSG, and they should be warned that Tunch loves company and will probably pester them when they come over.

It is not clear that from the article that the SEC has any problem with the data. It is simple stating that the files from Clinton and Obama are so big that you could not use Excel 2003 for them. It does not state that the SEC does not have Excel 2007.

So it is pretty much a filler article trying to look more important than it is. The main bit of real information - the campaigns now have so many donors that they overwhelm old software. Whoopi.

Technorati Tags: Education, Government, Politics

A new use for the Post Office

Electronics Recycling by Mail:
[Via Social Design Notes]
On March 18, the U.S. Postal Service announced that the Clover Technologies Group would provide postage paid envelopes to mail them expired inkjet cartridges, PDAs, Blackberries, digital cameras, iPods or MP3 players to be reused, refurbished or recycled. Envelops will be available at U.S. Post Offices at no cost to the public. Only a pilot project for now, but could expand nationally. (via)

This is a nice idea. I wonder what all the energy costs of recycling are, though? It would be nice to know what they are able to recycle and what is just hazardous material they have to dispose of.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Non-Profit, Sustainability

Make you wonder…

by Noël Zia Lee
OH RLY? Steampunk as a way of life :
[Via Amygdala]

OH RLY? Steampunk as a way of life:

[...] First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

Or is it just a goddamn hobby?

[...] and Paul Di Filippo, the author of “The Steampunk Trilogy,” the historical science fiction novellas that lent the culture its name.

Yeah, that’s complete crap. K. W. Jeter and Tim Powers and James Blaylock should be calling. Paul’s Steampunk Trilogy didn’t come out until 1995. The earliest story in it, “Victoria,” appeared in 1991.

But steampunk had long been on everyone’s lips before Bill Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine came out in 1991, of course; we’d all been referring to the steampunk genre for more than a decade by then, after Jeter coined “steampunk” in an April 1987 issue of Locus.

Paul’s trilogy was named for the genre, not vice versa.

Apparently on top of being completely incompetent at basic research, the writer, Ruth La Ferla, couldn’t even spare two seconds to glance at Wikipedia.

Your New York Times in action: getting the simplest facts completely wrong.

In other news from the same article, who knew that Tony Stark was a robot?

[...] Contemporary fictional parallels in film include the wildly ingenious scientist played by Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man,” who hopes to save the world by retooling himself as a flame-throwing robot made of unwieldy scrap metal parts.

Equally accurate.

…how some people get their job? Are there any editors anymore or fact checkers or do they just write whatever comes into their heads? Bloggers do that but we are not the NYT nor do we usually get paid by an organization.

And how anyone can see Iron Man and see the high tech as somehow retro, pseudo-Victorian ? Seems like a lazy writer.

I did not realize that an astrolabe or a sextant was a Steampunk item. People have interesting hobbies but according to this article Steampunk restores the sense of wonder, offers a coping device, expresses formality, and is ‘an enticing marketing hook.’ Its a desert topping and a floor wax!

Technorati Tags: General, Science

Teaching science

by Vik Nanda

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Rethinking Outreach: Teaching the Process of Science through Modeling:
[Via PLoS Biology: New Articles]

How can we get high school students interested in science? Here is a program that matches students with researchers, with the purpose of building a physical model of the protein being investigated in the lab.
What an outstanding idea! Not only did these students learn a great deal about how research is actually done but they also were instrumental in helping the researcher have some of the tools he needed.

These sorts of interactions will always be needed. Humans like to interact personally with others. But, Web 2.0 technologies can make it easier for these sorts of interactions to take place. Meetup is a great example of this.

There are already hints that scientific meetings may take a similar path. Again, not to replace the conferences already taking place but as an adjunct.

Update: Of course, Web 2.0 approaches can also expand the reach of teaching and communications. A great example was the recent EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Online Focus Session.

Technorati Tags: Education, General, Open Access, Technology