Buy stock in hard drive companies

What’s in an Illumina GA run directory?:
[Via PolITiGenomics]

One of the main things that differentiates genomics from other endeavors that use a lot of disk space is that genomics file systems tend to have a lot of files (millions). This was true with Sanger sequencing, and it seems to be even more true with next-generation sequencing technologies, especially Illumina/Solexa and AB SOLiD. This large number of files and the parallel access of these files by large computational clusters tends to give most storage solutions great difficulty.So what, exactly, is in an Illumina run directory? Well, to get breakdowns of file statistics there is a nifty little tool called fsstats. It is just a simple Perl script that crawls through a directory stat’ing files and reporting metrics. For example, when you run it on an Illumina GA IIx 2×100, high cluster density run after the primary analysis has completed, you get the following information about the distribution of file sizes. (I have rearranged and condensed the information to make it fit.)

total 7.46 TB used to store 7.46 TB user data, overhead 0.04%
count=991227 avg=8076.50 KB
min=0.00 KB max=13128679.30 KB
size range    count   %tot  %tot cum       total size   %tot  %tot cum
[       0-       2 KB):   4019 ( 0.41) (  0.41)       3009.03 KB ( 0.00) (  0.00)
[       2-       4 KB):      2 ( 0.00) (  0.41)          6.99 KB ( 0.00) (  0.00)
[       4-       8 KB):    981 ( 0.10) (  0.50)       5964.82 KB ( 0.00) (  0.00)
[       8-      16 KB): 193351 (19.51) ( 20.01)    2588619.88 KB ( 0.03) (  0.03)
[      16-      32 KB):   2656 ( 0.27) ( 20.28)      58586.79 KB ( 0.00) (  0.03)
[      32-      64 KB):    901 ( 0.09) ( 20.37)      31369.79 KB ( 0.00) (  0.03)
[      64-     128 KB):   2893 ( 0.29) ( 20.66)     303872.38 KB ( 0.00) (  0.04)
[     128-     256 KB):      2 ( 0.00) ( 20.66)        345.34 KB ( 0.00) (  0.04)
[     256-     512 KB):      4 ( 0.00) ( 20.66)       1222.53 KB ( 0.00) (  0.04)
[     512-    1024 KB):      1 ( 0.00) ( 20.66)        622.26 KB ( 0.00) (  0.04)
[    1024-    2048 KB):      2 ( 0.00) ( 20.66)       3199.89 KB ( 0.00) (  0.04)
[    2048-    4096 KB):     12 ( 0.00) ( 20.66)      41779.69 KB ( 0.00) (  0.04)
[    4096-    8192 KB): 776654 (78.35) ( 99.02) 5863161178.18 KB (73.24) ( 73.28)
[   16384-   32768 KB):     21 ( 0.00) ( 99.02)     487156.46 KB ( 0.01) ( 73.28)
[   32768-   65536 KB):   3856 ( 0.39) ( 99.41)  163552521.17 KB ( 2.04) ( 75.32)
[   65536-  131072 KB):   3825 ( 0.39) ( 99.79)  307535341.32 KB ( 3.84) ( 79.17)
[  131072-  262144 KB):    133 ( 0.01) ( 99.81)   32458046.12 KB ( 0.41) ( 79.57)
[  262144-  524288 KB):   1787 ( 0.18) ( 99.99)  658830514.46 KB ( 8.23) ( 87.80)
[ 2097152- 4194304 KB):     16 ( 0.00) ( 99.99)   47898262.36 KB ( 0.60) ( 88.40)
[ 4194304- 8388608 KB):     64 ( 0.01) (100.00)  432084134.39 KB ( 5.40) ( 93.80)
[ 8388608-16777216 KB):     47 ( 0.00) (100.00)  496603147.67 KB ( 6.20) (100.00)

So the total size of the run directory is nearly 7.5 TB and there are almost one million files. The average size of a file in the run directory is about 8 MB and the maximum size is over 13 GB. The images (represented in the 4096-8192 KB range), comprise over 78% of the files and 73% of the total size of the run directory. This significant penalty can be avoided by using RTA and not transferring image files. The largest files are the alignment (ELAND) outputs and the FASTQ files in the GERALD directory. Speaking of directories, here is a breakdown by number of files in each directory.

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7.5 terabytes! One million files! That just boggles the imagination. I love how the sizes are still in kilobytes. 1 terabyte is over a million kilobytes. or 1000 gigabytes. A blue ray disk can store up to 50 gigabytes on a dual layer disk so 1 terabyte would take 20 of these disks.

With all the sequencing going on, there will be lots of huge storage centers to hold all the data. I wonder how long it takes to back up several terabytes of information?

Technorati Tags: Health, Science, Technology

Explaining the rules

by gabrielerosa56
I object!:
[Via Bad Astronomy]

I was recently involved in a discussion of post-modernism and relativism that started when a commenter on my blog tried to support how astrology can be true and then continued when I posted on Twitter about it. I wrote:

The human condition is relative from human to human and culture to culture. But there are scientific truths outside and independent of us.

I thought my meaning was clear. What might be moral in one culture may not be in another, and in many cases that’s OK. Cultures are different. But in the objective reality of the Universe, such relativism may fall apart. Physical laws have an objective reality; we may interpret them, but they continue to do what they do whether our interpretation is correct or not.

This led to a discussion of the meaning of things, and that I think is the important issue.

A follower on Twitter said:

Gravity may well exist. But if we can’t describe it, it’s hardly objective. And we can’t possible know it’s [sic] meaning.

[More]

I agree totally with Phil. Gravity has no ‘meaning’ and exists whether humans are here or not. Yet the discussion seems to be a nice measure of something discussed in the new book ‘Don’t Be Such A Scientist‘ by Randy Olson.

Most people see the world quite differently than scientists. They have emotional responses to things that we see as simply factual.

Many people deal with a complex world by using a few simple rules of thumb (or as scientists would say, heuristics). They do not have to think deeply about a new pattern. They see where it fits in their rules. And if it does not fit, they generally just ignore it.

Scientists have been trained to really use a much more complex set of heuristics because we have directly seen so many examples of how simple rules of thumb lead researchers astray. One such rule is to stick to facts, not to metaphysical meanings, which often have little real impact on objective facts.

So I am not surprised that  the follower on Twitter discussed meaning. People look for meaning in all sorts of things; they try to find patterns even when there are not any.

While this is now a very non-selective approach (it can lead to decisions that are actually harmful for survival), in simpler times while on the savannah, finding patterns would be very useful for identifying the lion in the brush.

Researchers have trained themselves to actually think against some of our basic premises. Humans look for meanings and patterns in everything. Scientists have trained themselves to find the facts, not the meanings or misleading patterns.

Thus, a girl dying after being injected with a vaccine is, to many people, a sign that the vaccine caused the death. Scientists know that these post hoc fallacies are often wrong and wait. When it is found that she had a severe underlying illness, only scientists are really reassured.

Most people have already made the new rule that the vaccine is bad. Simply telling them that this is not so will have little effect. The only way I have found to get them to really ‘think’ and perhaps alter their rule is to use stories that come at the fallacy in ways that they can easily understand.

I’ve have used this story a couple of times:

A women puts on a red sweater, gets on a plane and then dies in a plane crash. Since she crashed so soon after putting on the red sweater, authorities are suspending sales of red sweaters until they can determine whether it was responsible for the accident. While it is an unlikely cause, they want to make sure that there is no connection.

Now, most people would say this is just ridiculous because there is no way that red sweaters could cause a crash. When the investigation shows the rear til broke off of the plane, everyone gets very comfortable because that explanation fits their rule of thumb quite nicely.

Why weren’t they fooled by the initial post hoc argument? Because many have direct knowledge of the entire system and know that the original conclusion is wrong.

Not so with most science, such as vaccine development. The process is a mystery as well as one that they have little control over.

Telling them the facts will not change this very basic rule of thumb. To get them to re-evaluate their conclusion, they need to be provided with a similar ’story’ but one that illustrates the new rule by contradicting their old rule.

So after giving a nice story, I can then describe how a vaccine undergoes strong safety checks, how hundreds if not thousands of people have received it and that the side effects are no different than placebo.

Like an airplane, we may be a little reluctant to give up control but the results are so beneficial that this discomfort is worth it.

After all of this, a sudden death actually caused by the vaccine would be as odd as a red sweater causing a plane crash.

Not everyone gets it (some heuristics are too strong, particularly ones dealing with various forms of woo) but I have actually gotten a couple to be a little more skeptical. At least when they see a report, like the one (I’ll wait to actually see the results published. I also wonder if they looked at people who got no vaccine but got the flu last year, as a control) , they come and check with me.

I can see why Aesop’s Fables are so useful. They provide easy ways to gather rules of thumb that can be important in a complex world. Maybe we need some new fables for a complex world.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Science, Technology

Almost a Dickian story

Surrogates: Life… Only Shallower:
[Via Science Not Fiction]

The world of Surrogates, people venture forth into the world via sleek and sexy avatars from the comfort of elaborate wireless hookups in their bedrooms. Life…Only Better goes the technology tagline. In theory, the scene won’t take place for another half century – unless you’re watching the film in Los …

[More]

I was struck by how much this felt like a movie based on a Philip K. Dick story. The paranoia, the inability to know what was real or not, the disconnection of human emotion from consequence. It even had a novel drug – sparking, where the surrogates slightly electrocuted each other.

I really liked it. Very much a genre movie without a whole lot of deep thought about the message that was there. Just put us into this world, and solve a murder. But it is a world where you can never be sure just who is operating the surrogate you are interacting with, where there is not a single human-human interaction or even a touch until the very end.

It did not do well at the box office but I think it will gain in stature as time goes one. It posits important questions about what makes us human that are not easily answered.

Technorati Tags: General, Science, Technology

Let’s hope it works

by art_es_anna
Remarks by the President on Innovation and Sustainable Growth:
[Via OSTP Blog]

President Obama gave a speech in upstate New York yesterday on the importance of American innovation. You can follow this link to the White House for a transcript of his remarks: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-Innovation-and-Sustainable-Growth-at-Hudson-Valley-Community-College/

Furthermore, President Obama, OSTP and the National Economic Council released a Strategy for American Innovation: http://www.ostp.gov/galleries/press_release_files/SEPT%2020%20%20Innovation%20Whitepaper_FINAL.PDF

[More]

There is some good stuff in the Strategy for American Innovation report. There is this:

While it is clear that a new foundation for innovation and growth is needed, the appropriate framework for government involvement is still debated. Some claim that the laissez-faire policies of the last decade approach the right strategy, and that the recent crisis was the result of too much rather than too little government support. This view calls for cutting government regulation and gutting public programs, hoping the market will take care of the rest.

However, the recent crisis illustrates that the free market itself does not promote the long-term benefit of society, and that certain fundamental investments and regulations are necessary to promote the social good. This is particularly true in the case of investments for research and development, where knowledge spillovers and other externalities ensure that the private sector will under-invest –especially in the most basic of research.

Another view is that the government must dominate certain sectors, protecting and insulating those areas thought to be drivers of future growth. This view calls for massive, sustained government investment supported by stringent oversight, dictating the type and direction of both public and private investments through mandates and bans.

But historical experience in this country and others clearly indicates that governments who try to pick winners and drive growth too often end up wasting resources and stifling rather than promoting innovation. This is in part due to the limited ability of the government to predict the future, but also because such exercises are distorted by lobbyists and rent seekers, which are more likely to favor backward looking industries than forward looking ones. In the United States such failures at picking winners and losers includes most prominently the Synthetic Fuel Corporation, a $20 billion Federal project in the 1980s that failed to provide the promised alternative to oil.

Therefore, we reject both sides of this unproductive and anachronistic debate. The true choice in innovation is not between government and no government, but about the right type of government involvement in support of innovation. A modern, practical approach recognizes both the need for fundamental support and the hazards of overzealous government intervention. The government should make sure individuals and businesses have the tools and support to take risks and innovate, but should not dictate what risks they take.

We propose to strike a balance by investing in the building blocks that only the government can provide, setting an open and competitive environment for businesses and individuals to experiment and grow, and by providing extra catalysts to jumpstart innovation in sectors of national importance. In this way, we will harness the inherent ingenuity of the American people and a dynamic private sector to generate innovations that help ensure the next expansion is more solid, broad-based, and beneficial than previous ones.

They then provide some examples of when government did it right, such as DARPA or emerging fields like nanotechnology or personalized medicine.

The overall report is quite ambitious but set some goals that should be achievable. They may have to be if the US is to be an important part of solving the complex problems we have ahead of us.

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology

What does your gut say?

Pew pew pew!:
[Via Bad Astronomy]

Of course I scored 100%. Can you?

The bigger question is, how do the statistics play out? A lot of people scored far less than what I would consider acceptable, given that the questions relate to practical science that is getting a lot of attention in the news, and people …

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These were pretty easy questions. But then I am well-educated. The college educated were consistently much more successful at answering the questions than any other group.

Interestingly, women did better than men only on the questions that dealt with health or biology. However, without error bars, it is hard to know how meaningful the data really is.

I am not too surprised that 90% of the population could not get all of them correct. Even people who know the answer can make a mistake when answering. My problem was that these were so easy that I kept trying to find the ‘trick’ answer. Once I realized that the obvious answer was correct, it was a much easier test.

One problem we have in America is that if you are smart, you get called elitist and are placed in the ‘other’ category, to be ignored. America is really not a culture that respects those who have great knowledge. It does not really want to listen to those who have studied a lifetime to understand some important parts of our natural world. They would rather listen to a TV star who tells them to take magic water.

Oh America will use the talents of these ‘elitists’ but it will seldom make them cultural icons. We generally make icons out of those who follow their ‘git instinct’ not those who follow the facts. Look how many of the stories we tell or the TV shows and movies are based on people who make decisions based on their guts rather than rationality?

Even though gut instincts did not get us to the moon or design hybrid autos or remove small pox from the world.

Here is one of my favorite movie scenes dealing with a man who knows the facts and a man who imagines he does. Which one is more often the hero in American culture?

And here is the next scene, where the results of this little thought experiment are found:

You would think that we would honor the people who were right when it comes to finding solutions. But so often we honor those who were wrong but whose gut instincts seemed right. We seem to favor palmistry rather than medicine, astrology rather than astronomy.

Sometimes I fear for our survival.

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology

The perfect Christmas present

xkcd: volume 0:
[Via xkcd]

The xkcd book is now officially available in the store! (There are also a handful of new shirts available for preorder, and we’ve got the signed prints back in stock).

[More]

I hope my Mom still checks out my blog. I’d love this book for Christmas. Plus the money goes to help build a school.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Technology

Why our kids are different

How games change your brain:
[Via Cosmic Log]

Mind Research Institute

This graphic shows areas of the brain that functioned more efficiently after three
months of video-game practice (blue) as well as areas where the cortex became
thicker (red). The left and right views show the left and right brain hemispheres.

The effects of video-game playing on your brain have been studied for a quarter-century, but the latest research reveals that there are deep puzzles yet to be solved….

[More]

I’m afraid to see what my son’s mind looks like. These changes were seen with an average of only 90 minutes of game playing a week! And they found “that the Tetris players’ brain function became more efficient in areas linked to critical thinking, reasoning, language and information processing.”

The places where the brains became thicker, indicating more neurons, where the brain deals with planning complex movement and dealing with large amounts of sensory information.

I would suspect game playing in primates has always had an important part in the development of many important higher functions of the brain. Humans have always had places for game playing, even in adults. That would explain football.

But now we can participate in a much larger variety of games by using digital means. These games could be designed to produce specific results in or brain structure. Finding out how to create games that would increase critical thinking, for example,would be really wonderful.

Nice report. And there is this great comment from the researcher:

“In science, everyone makes a very big deal about having a hypothesis before you go on a fishing expedition,” Haier said. “Never once in 20 years has my hypothesis worked out the way I thought it would. The brain is always a surprise.”

That is what is so much fun with science – being surprised. As Issac Asimov said:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I’ve found it!), but ‘That’s funny…’

Science is much more fun when we are wrong. Then we get to find out something new, something unusual. The best science is done by those that love this aspect of research – it requires an adaptability of thought that can be exhilarating.

It takes a special sort of person who likes being wrong, who is excited by trying to figure out the unknown. Many like to take small steps along the path of knowledge, hoping not to slip off and lose the trail. Others just take a huge leap, knowing that they will be smart and adaptable enough to land on their feet or potentially find a whole new trail.

The world needs both types – doers and disruptors. Too much of either will result in problems.

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology

Complex applications often require significant testing

There’s many a slip ‘twixt spit and SNP: errors in personal genomics data:
[Via Genetic Future]

Peter Aldhous has a great piece of detective work in New Scientist, which has revealed a bizarre and sporadic glitch in the online software provided by personal genomics company deCODEme to allow customers to view their genetic data.

The glitch appears to be restricted to the display of data from the mitochondrial genome (a piece of DNA with a special fascination for genetic genealogists, since it is inherited almost exclusively along the maternal line). On several separate occasions the deCODEme browser presented Aldhous with a mitochondrial profile that was spectacularly wrong, differing from the profile in his raw data at 44 out of 93 positions.

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It looks like the software glitch may have been fixed but it required some very astute observations by a knowledgeable user. And this case was pretty obvious with so many errors present.

What would happen with errors that are more subtle? Particularly when the data may be used to make medical decisions? I figure that these things will be worked out eventually but in the meantime, there will be a very strong need to carefully vet the results from applications such as this.

Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Science, Technology

Who are they empowering?

Microsoft erases the black guy:
[Via AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth]

Notice any difference in these two pics from Microsoft’s USA and Poland Web sites?

USA:

Poland:

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They kept the Asian dude but lost the Black guy. And they actually look like they obviously put a White guy’s head on top since the hands are still black!

What a bad Photoshop job. And let’s not even talk about the color scheme. MS marketing needs some real help.

Technorati Tags: General, Science, Technology

Organic computers

DNA ‘organises itself’ on silicon:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

Researchers have shown that engineered, self-organising DNA chunks could be used to build smaller, faster computers.

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This is essentially using DNA strands to carry electronic currents instead of wires. I would imagine that computer design would be smaller but essentially the same, just with much smaller wires.

I wonder about the stability of these DNA wires. How will they maintain sterility so that bacteria do not decide to ‘eat’ the wires? Copper is pretty stable, and does not get eaten. DNA wires could.

ALso, what about heat? Components that close can generate a lot of energy, which is usually dissipated but is why laptops can get so warm. CPUs reach temperatures greater than 50 °C all the time. Heat degrades DNA. Normally if you cool down a hot computer, it will return to normal. That is, the ‘wires’ are most likely intact.. Would the same be true for DNA ‘wires’?

And just think about the damage someone could do with a solution of DNAse, an enzyme that degrades DNA.

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology

Listen to innovation

Innovation:
[Via Lawyers, Guns and Money]

Les Paul, R.I.P.

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Not only did Les Paul have an vital role in developing the electric guitar, he was the man more than any other who manipulated sound using tape. He put a playhead in front of the record head in what was a single track tape machine.

Then he could splice the feed from the playback head back into the record head, along with another line from a microphone, allowing him to overdub the music. Essentially there would be two parts of music in the place of one. By repeating this again and again, he could build up quite a rich piece of music. The example above has 12 parts on one track while they play/sing another. The reason for the headphones is to hear the sound from the first playhead as they add onto it.

But what is incredible is he actually pioneered overdubbing techniques before tape came along (which was pushed by another innovator, Bing Crosby). He did the same sorts of things using acetate disks as the recording medium. He overlaid tracks to produce 8 different parts to a song, all done by using a every tricky medium to record.

Well, tricky because he built the machine to do it using old car parts. And by recording things at different speeds, he could produce sounds that were really unplayable outside the studio.

With the advent of multitrack tape machines (which were created partly because of his innovations), Les Paul’s approaches had even more influence but his work on recordable disks and early tape recorders created innovative approaches we still use today, even in a digital world.

Technorati Tags: Technology

From Earth to Mars, and back again, in 80 days

Trip to Mars. 39 days. I’m ready.:
[Via Creativity Central]

Got this hot off the press of one of my favorite inspiration stops. Gizmag. Micheal Mulcahy who always has his finger on the pulse of what’s new, writes about a new ion plasma rocket being developed by a former astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz. This rocket can potentially reach Mars in just 39 days using a fraction of the fuel and a fraction of the current estimated time of six months.

Mulcahy writes “The problem with traditional rockets is that they’re terribly inefficient. About 90% of a mission’s initial weight is fuel, most of which is burned up escaping earth’s gravitational pull. After that, a traditional rocket could only slowly coast to Mars. Very slowly. Scientists describe rocket efficiency in terms of specific impulse, which is a rough measure of how fast fuel is ejected out of the back of the rocket. A chemical rocket has a relatively low specific impulse of 450 seconds – in other words, it gets one pound of thrust from one pound of fuel for 450 seconds.

Chang-Diaz’s prototype, however, promises specific impulses as high as 15,000 seconds. How? Well, his rocket doesn’t achieve propulsion by combusting fuel but, rather, by superheating atoms to create and expel a plasma plume.”

VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) could, theoretically, reach power levels a hundred times that of other ion engines. But there are still major big problems that need to be addressed before anyone can start packing their bags for Mars.”

[More]

It only appears to work in space. Earth’s gravity is too much for it. But the ability to get a lot of bang for the buck has made ion-driven engines very interesting. This particular one is likely to be tested in 2012 in space. It might not be used for manned flight but would certainly revolutionize unmanned exploration of the solar system.

I wonder how long to the Oort Cloud.

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology

Cops on camera

Cops Frame Woman for Routine Accident:
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

An accident that was their fault, by the way, because they hit her from behind. Four police officers from Hollywood, Florida are caught on camera inventing evidence and plotting to falsify police reports to frame an innocent woman that they ran into with a police car. New professionalism, indeed. Video below the fold.

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What is just jaw-dropping is that the cops knew they were being filmed and recorded by their own cameras yet they still talked about the frame up on camera. This would indicate that they felt the film would never see the light of day. As the reporter says, this calls into question every single DWI that these 4 policemen were involved in.

Nothing like a little transparency to keep people honest, I guess. Although I expect in the future that the police conspirators will just make sure they are off camera when they plot. Maybe we will then have to put wireless cameras and mikes on every cop in order to make sure they do their job with covering up malfeasance?

Technorati Tags: Technology

I’ve been waiting for this

Wireless power system shown off:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

A US firm has demonstrated its technique that sends power through the air, powering and charging devices wirelessly.

[More]

One of the big items from science fiction of my youth that has not appeared yet is broadcast power – charging and running things without the need for a ire or cord.

Now we could charge our cell phones without ever having to plug them in. Same with flashlights or even TVs. Even electric cars could be recharged while standing still.

I’m sure there will be some other great uses that come up. Should be fun.

Technorati Tags: Energy Use, Science

Not quite like Bradbury wrote but close

by Kuja
Amazon E-Deletes Bought And Paid For Orwell Titles From Kindles:
[Via The Moderate Voice]

LATER UPDATE -Amazon says it won’t happen again:

These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.

Is that equivocation?

If Amazon wanted to appease customers worried that digital media they buy from the company might disappear, unannounced, it could do so, very easily. It could just say: “We won’t be taking away stuff we sell you ever again. You buy it, you own it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a book, a CD, or a collection of bytes.”

Because, as I noted before, that’s basically what the Kindle license already says: Amazon says it grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content”. It doesn’t seem to add any caveats that I can see.

I’m hoping Amazon’s language here is just an awkward bit of PRspeak, and not a lawyerly way of reserving rights to pull stuff off Kindles sometime down the road. But I’ve asked, and will let you know if I hear back.

Brad Stone’s NYTimes piece says this isn’t the first book to be pulled back. He also adds this interesting wrinkle:

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

And Edward Tenner says, “I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the rights question… I have written for Technology Review on the perils of digital limits on the rights of legitimate buyers.”

[More]

So, Amazon has a backdoor that permits them to remove any digital book on your Kindle. They say that NOW they won’t ever do that again but what happens when they change their minds? Ot if the government ‘asks’ them? The telephone companies have done all sorts of questionable things when the government asks.

How about if China does not like a particular book? Could the book be removed while you visited China? Sure, Amazon could give it back to you when you return to America but this whole affair seems to be another reason to keep the paperback around. The digital realm is just too unknown right now.

Particularly when the manufacturers of the portable readers include the ability to take back anything that you have on the reader.

Of course it is ironic that 1984 was one of the books. But the possibilities are closer to Fahrenheit 451, where government firemen destroy books. In a world of digital books, this sort of power, the power to remove works without a trace, is very foreboding. Better to keep things on paper.

This just cripples the idea of digital books. First we can not resell them. Now they can be taken away.

I expect there to be some big lawsuits here. And not only because Amazon apparently went against its own Terms of Service. Or even the tremendous damage done to the whole idea of having books solely in a digital form. There are a wealth of other problems. Particularly things like the boy whose work was also destroyed. It is one thing to remove the book but to also destroy the works of others would seem to be very actionable.

I expect the ramifications from this to last for some time. Even when they say they won’t do it again, the loss of trust makes that hard to believe. Terms of Service are altered all the time without warning. The control still remains in Amazon’s power not the customer’s. New management at Amazon could always change things.

Bradbury imagined a world where firemen burnt books. Little did he know that the real future would simply have companies deleting files remotely. Somehow, evil is much more boring and banal in real life than in books.

At least in paperback books.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Social media