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Saturday, December 31, 2005 |
The cloning scandal: how did it happen?.
Nature has a full timeline of the unraveling of of Hwang Woo Suk's claims at stem cell cloning breakthroughs. Ipbiz notes that the first doubts were expressed months before the story broke by a Korean TV show and commentators on the Internet. "According to the (New York Times) article, it was an anonymous post on a confidential Internet bulletin board maintained by ''PD Notebook,'' a South Korea investigative news show, that got the ball rolling on an investigation into Hwang's research." The "PD Notebook" show never got a chance to pursue the story After a run of 15 years it was abruptly canceled in murky circumstances. The Marmot describes the final efforts to cover-up the fraud, quoting Chosun which reports how "two close collaborators of the embattled cloning expert Prof. Hwang Woo-suk gave US$30,000 to Kim Seon-jong, a former member of Hwang’s team who admitted fabricating data at the scientist’s behest". Marmot points to a source suggesting that another Korean media company acted as a 'bagman' to help suppress the scandal.
Secondhand Smoke thinks that selective science has become the handmaiden of political agendas and undermines the integrity of the peer review process. In a separate post Ipbiz highlights the short "peer review process" of the Korean cloning claims noting that Hwang's paper was submitted to the journal Science on March 15, 2005 and accepted on May 12, with an online version published on May 15. The whistleblower cast doubts on the results on the "PD Notebook" website a few days afterward. Blog.bioethics.net says Hwang is now "blaming his peers", accusing them to switching stem cell colonies with him. It argues that "U.S. Support of stem cell research is the only way to prevent this from recurring ... There are those who hold that the key issues here involve the money, lack of regulation, conflicts of interest, and misconceptions held by donors, government and the people of Korea about what this research could do - misconceptions that led to giving one man too much lattitude. And there are those who believe that the evils of destroying embryos could only lead to such an outcome, a 'greater evil'. We've made our argument - whatever the cause and whatever the sin there is only one way for the problem to be fixed and that is US funding of stem cell research with concomitant ethical standards the world is forced to either meet or forgo the US market for its drugs and devices".
The Dram Man blog obtained a translation of Hwang Woo-suk's patent applications on file with the Korean Intellectual Property Office and noticed that most of the members of the team which produced the foundation on which Hwang's Nature article was based did not associate themselves with the article and thinks that should have rung alarm bells. The Dram Man argues that Hwang must have been in a financial hole by then because the patent applications cost about US$250,000 to file. [PJM - Top Stories]
9:53:36 PM 
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Every #1 song ever to appear on Billboard Top 100 squashed into one long song.
R. Luke DuBois has created an interesting piece of music out of the 857 songs that have appeared at the top of the charts in the Billboard Top 100 since 1958. The result, called "Billboard," is 37 minutes long.
Billboard allows you to get a birds-eye view of the Billboard Hot 100 by listening to all the #1 singles from 1958 through the millenium using a technique I've been working on for a couple of years called time-lapse phonography. The 857 songs used to make the piece are analyzed digitally and a spectral average is then derived from the entire song. Just as a long camera exposure will fuse motion into a single image, spectral averaging allows us to look at the average sonority of a piece of music, however long, giving a sort of average timbre of a piece. This gives us a sense of the average key and register of the song, as well as some clues about the production values present at the time the record was made; for example, the improvements in home stereo equipment over the past fifty years, as well as the gradual replacement of (relatively low-fidelity) AM radio with FM broadcasting has had an impact on how records are mixed... drums and bass lines gradually become louder as you approach the present, increasing the amount of spectral noise and low tones in our averages.
Link (Thanks, Arwen!)
[Boing Boing]
9:53:09 PM
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Excellent TiVo practical joke.
Mark Frauenfelder: Thomas Hawk says: "Google Video has a homemade video up done by a bunch of guys who played a practical joke on their friend. They basically TiVo'd the Texas lottery show and then bought a lottery ticket for their friend the next day and played it back like it was live. The guy goes nuts thinking that he just won the Texas lottery and screams and yells and jumps up and down and hugs everyone. Hey, if not to give you the high of winning the lottery at least once in your life, what are good friends for anyway?" Link (Caution -- lots of swear words are uttered in the video.) [Boing Boing]
9:52:05 PM
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The Youngest and Oldest Teams in the NBA.
. . .
To find out where all the teams stood, i went through and took the age of each player on dec 31st and multiplied by the number of minutes they have played and calculated the weighted average age for each team.
. . .
[Blog Maverick]
9:33:01 PM
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From September:
The Hundred Dollar Laptop: Computing for Developing Nations
Negroponte provides first hand account of his revolutionary idea, to
make a laptop computer available and affordable for more than 800
million children worldwide—in one of the most interesting technology
stories of 2005.
Speaker:
Nicholas P. Negroponte
Chairman and Co-Founder, MIT Media Laboratory
Wiesner Professor of Media Technology
Chairman, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
12:34:03 PM
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'I Will Eat Your Dollars': To
the cyber scammers in Nigeria who trawl for victims on the Internet,
Americans are easy targets. But one thief had second thoughts.
By Robyn Dixon, L. A. Times.
As patient as fishermen, the young men toil day and night,
trawling for replies to the e-mails they shoot to strangers half a
world away.
Most recipients hit delete, delete, delete, delete without ever opening
the messages that urge them to claim the untold riches of a long-lost
deceased second cousin, and the messages that offer millions of dollars
to help smuggle loot stolen by a corrupt Nigerian official into a U.S.
account.
But the few who actually reply make this a tempting and lucrative
business for the boys of Festac, a neighborhood of Lagos at the center
of the cyber-scam universe. The targets are called maghas — scammer
slang from a Yoruba word meaning fool, and refers to gullible white
people.
. . .
The atmosphere of silent concentration inside the cafe is absolute,
strangely reminiscent of a university library before exams. Except,
that is, for the odd guffaw or cheer. The doors are locked from 10:30
p.m. until 7 a.m., so the cyber thieves can work in peace without fear
of armed intruders.
. . .
The e-mail scammers here prefer hitting Americans, whom they see as
rich and easy to fool. They rationalize the crime by telling themselves
there are no real victims: Maghas are avaricious and complicit.
To them, the scams, called 419 after the Nigerian statute against
fraud, are a game.
Their anthem, "I Go Chop Your Dollars," hugely popular in Lagos, hit
the airwaves a few months ago as a CD penned by an artist called
Osofia:
"419 is just a game, you are the losers, we are the winners.
White people are greedy, I can say they are greedy
White men, I will eat your dollars, will take your money and disappear.
419 is just a game, we are the masters, you are the losers."
12:33:50 PM
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