Thursday, April 13, 2006

Meeting Yields No Progress on Curbing Iran Nuclear Bid [New York Times: International News] 10:44:06 PM    comment []

Bush's bluster. What good are U.S. threats against Iran when the whole world has lost its trust in our government? [Salon] 10:43:48 PM    comment []

We have the technology!. According to The New York Times Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests is the most emailed article today. As I've stated before, I believe this area of science & technology is driven by psychology. The same drive which has led men and women to enter into the time consuming hobby of genealogy for hundreds of years. Below, NuSapiens offers the opinion that the new technology will undermine the current orthodoxies and mentalities in regards to race. Unfortunately, I don't believe that anymore...I just think people are too driven by their intuitive pattern matching & categorization schemas to properly digest statistical information. This is a lot like the prayer & heart disease study, one of the main reasons people threw 2.5 million dollars into the topic was because they had a priori psychological needs that needed to be met. No doubt we'll be funding prayer & medicine studies indefinitely, inconclusive results won't stop us. One of the reasons that scientists are so fascistic about seemingly arbitrary p-values is that the urge to see a "trend" is within us all. Read the rest of this post... [Gene Expression] 10:43:25 PM    comment []

Movable Feast/ Fete Mobile. Carried by a twenty foot blimp, Movable Feast / Fête Mobile is an autonomously controlled vehicle that, nevertheless, offers its audience limited access to influence its trajectory as well as its optics through an online interface. An onboard wireless local-file server allows the public to exchange media files, remotely view their surroundings from above via a video camera, and display text message on an LED panel mounted on blimp. The audience are invited to connect to the blimp's on-board wireless micro-computer through their laptop computers in order to exchange files with the blimp's mobile archive. This allows Fête Mobile to function as a kind of autonomous "sneaker network", physically out of reach of the authorities. The project is concerned with public space, file sharing, and the phenomenon of local community wireless networking. It proposes a model for an autonomous system of media exchange that exists in the public radio spectrum. It also aims to question some of our beliefs in the invincibility of the Internet. The Internet is in fact merely decentralized. Catastrophic failure targeted at key switching stations along the Internet's backbone could sever communication between whole regions of the globe, overnight transforming the Web into a fragmented archipelago of networked sub-regions. In a world where communications over the Internet has become either impossible or unsafe, Fête Mobile would function as a lifeline. At its most conceptual level, the project thus extrapolates current techno-political issues into a possible future scenario in which communities are locally connected through peering protocols whilst disconnected from Internet as a whole. A collaboration between Luke Moloney, Marc Tuters and Adrian Sinclair. Movable Feast will be deployed for ISEA 2006. [unmediated] 10:43:00 PM    comment []

The vanishing of a tropical nation. Rising seas are swamping the 33-island republic of Kiribati. Where will its 100,000 inhabitants go when their country becomes uninhabitable? [Salon] 10:42:55 PM    comment []

Better story on Bill Clinton's talk at BIO2006: Clinton calls biofuels key to creating jobs: Takes aim at Bush's decision to pull out of Kyoto agreement -- Urges industry leaders to act on poverty and the environment. By Stuart Laidlaw, Toronto Star. 12:36:56 PM    comment []

Iowa-sponsored gala finishes biotech confab, by Anne Fitzgerald, Des Moines Register. 11:36:56 AM    comment []

Blunt sells Missouri to biotech, by Rachel Melcer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Gov. Matt Blunt held a Tuesday morning breakfast for business leaders and held court at the Missouri pavilion during a crowded exhibition hall reception that evening. In between, he had one-on-one meetings with companies such as Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Amgen, a national biotech pharmaceutical star. His message: The Show-Me state has a good quality of life, biotech business infrastructure, private investors and, perhaps, a job-creation or tax incentive or two on the table for businesses ready to expand or locate there. "Life sciences is an important part of my vision for the state of Missouri," Blunt said at the breakfast. "We're in a prime position to become a national hub" of the industry that provides high-paying jobs and promises rapid growth for the future. 11:36:51 AM    comment []

Clinton Wows BIO 2006 Crowd While Stressing Importance of ''Science, Evidence and Argument'' (BIONewswire). 11:36:46 AM    comment []

R.I.P., The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. 10:36:36 AM    comment []

Universities for Women Push Borders in Persian Gulf:Single-sex institutions give students new freedom, but within cultural limits. By Katherine Zoepf, CHE (subscription required). "Over the last 30 years, this country has changed beyond recognition," says Sulaiman Al Jassim, Zayed University's vice president. " ... We can't afford not to have women in the work force any longer. When we give young women a chance for education, they don't want to stay at home any longer. They choose to work, to improve themselves, to use their skills. Their country needs this." For many young women, these colleges and universities represent their first chance at Western-style higher education. In years past, while young men from Persian Gulf countries headed abroad to complete their university studies on government scholarships, young women tended to remain at home. A woman from Qatar or Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, regardless of her age, profession, or social position, cannot legally travel abroad without the permission of a male relative — and even young women from relatively liberal families may find such permission difficult to obtain. Women in the emirates have been able to pursue higher education since 1977, when United Arab Emirates University was founded. But many students say the curriculum at the university — which has separate facilities for women, and women-only hours at shared facilities like the campus library — is too rigid and traditional. And the campus, which is in the city of Al Ain, is a painfully long commute — up to two and a half hours, depending on traffic — for students whose homes are in Abu Dhabi or Dubai. Fatma al-Sayegh, a professor of Emirati history at the university, says institutions like Zayed are producing a recognizably different type of student. "Their outlook is so different," she says. "They're very outspoken and Westernized. For sure this will have a long-term impact for the country." At most of the women's colleges, classes are taught in English. Faculty members typically are recruited from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The colleges sometimes require students to take special courses in English language and study skills when they arrive. At Zayed, young women usually choose their majors after studying in the Readiness Program, which teaches intensive English and study skills and a set of general-education courses. . . . In a second-year class in financial accounting, students work in groups and chat with a visitor about plans to open their own small home-based businesses. Eman al-Madani, who studies environmental health, is pleased that Zayed's general-education requirements have exposed her to fields outside her major, and that leadership-education events allow her to explore topics like team dynamics and leadership ethics. "I'm the kind of person who wants to try a lot of different things," she says. "I didn't know exactly what I wanted to focus on at first." She is particularly enthusiastic about the university's leadership program. "It gives you more confidence and teaches you how to communicate with different kinds of people," says Ms. al-Madani, who hopes to earn a master's degree in Britain after she graduates. "It's made me feel that I'm capable of depending on myself in the world." Alhough Zayed has no dormitories, and students go home to their families at the end of the day, students say there is a lively, engaged campus life, with a student council and frequent social events. Administrators say that students are encouraged to become self-reliant, and that, after completing their bachelor's degrees, a growing number of them pursue graduate studies abroad. Administrators also say the atmosphere on Zayed's campuses is increasingly free, although observers emphasize that these freedoms must be understood in the context of Emirati culture. "When I say that these institutions are free and progressive, I don't want to insinuate that they are like Western universities," says Ms. Al-Sayegh, the history professor. "'Progressive' in this case means better, but those universities are progressive without breaking with the customs, culture, and traditions of the UAE." On Zayed's campuses, unlike elsewhere in the emirates, no Web sites are blocked. (One administrator estimates that 90 percent of the students have seen the controversial cartoons that way.) But that doesn't mean that no subjects are off limits. . . . "I want to be one of the people who change the face of education in the UAE," says Sarra al Suwaidi, an education major at Zayed. "We shouldn't depend so much on foreign teachers. The teachers here are mainly from Egypt, and the quality is not good. It's not a respected profession. My family keeps saying, 'Sarra, please go for business.' But I feel that maybe I can be one of the people who change the school system here." But some foreign professors teaching here point out that there is another, cultural reason that so many young Emirati women are choosing to study toward degrees in education. Elementary-school teaching, where women are unlikely to come into contact with many adult men, is an acceptable profession for conservative families. Health management is another popular major because it requires dealing mainly with medical records. In contrast, majors that lead toward professions where the likelihood of interaction with men is high are far less popular. Helen Pearce, director of the communications department at Abu Dhabi Women's College, says she has difficulty getting students to major in communications fields, even though courses in journalism and graphic design are popular. "We ended up canceling the journalism major because there was so little interest," says Ms. Pearce, who is from Canada. "In most cases, the families wouldn't agree to the idea of their daughters' being on TV. Running around and covering stories for a print publication is also something that is difficult for women here." Zayed's communications department encourages recruits with a poster displaying an exhortation from Sheik Nahayan: "A media career is something valuable and honorable," it says. Mr. Wilson, the provost, says he and other faculty members sometimes worry that Zayed University, with its relative freedoms, supportive environment, and leadership-training program, may be raising young women's hopes beyond what their society can tolerate. Statistically speaking, Emirati women tend to marry young, and to marry their cousins. "We are concerned about what will happen to these very bright young women when they go out into the world," Mr. Wilson says. "But this society is changing so fast — the children of these girls will be something else." 8:36:20 AM    comment []

Midshipmen compete in NSA security drill Midshipmen at the Naval Academy took part in a simulated battle Tuesday, defending their computer systems against an attack by hackers from the National Security Agency in Fort Meade. . . . This combat was part of the sixth annual Cyber Defense Exercise, in which all the nation's service academies compete to see who can best defend an information network from the NSA team. Navy won last year's event. This year's competitors, besides Navy, are the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y., the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio. "It's a really practical application of what we learn in class," said Alison Teoh, 20, a junior and computer science major who is running the administrative side of the competition for Navy. "It's definitely dramatic as well, staying up four days straight and being slammed with attacks all the time by NSA." . . . The Midshipmen were optimistic about the competition, pointing out that the servers of other military academies had been disabled longer than theirs. . . . Jonathan Kindel, 22, a senior majoring in information technology and national security affairs, said his major combined technical study with the increasing importance of defense systems. "I know enough now to manage skills as a program manager, but there's also a political science twist to all of it," he said. "You get to learn the impact of this stuff on an international playground." 7:36:08 AM    comment []

Death by risk-aversion, from Creating Passionate Users. Risk-aversion is the single biggest innovation killer, and of course it's not just Microsoft that's been infected. Taking risks is... risky. But if not taking risks is even riskier, then WTF? . . . ... as I said in my previous post, Robert Scoble kept using the phrase "risk-averse" when defining some of Microsoft's problems. And I heard the same thing from Liz Lawley, who has been fascinated by the disconnect between the wonderful ideas MS employees have for products and services, and the final products and services released to the public. Somehow, according to Liz, fear steps in between those two points. But whose fear? The metaphor Liz used (she got from someone else) was that many of the "leaf nodes" (what Microsoft and Sun and others refer to as "individual contributors") tend to be innovative and brave, but many of the "branches" (i.e. layers of management) can't stomach the risks. In their (admirable) desire to be strong and stable, the "branches" put safety above all else. . . . . . . . Recognition is the first step. Unfortunately, those who recognize it tend to be the leaf nodes--the ones with the power to create and implement the ideas, but very little power to authorize them. Those with the most potential to create change are the branches. The Managers With a Clue. I had one of those at Sun--Jari Paukku, now a "Senior Change Management Specialist" for Nokia in Finland. He knew how to walk that fiber-thin line between keeping those above him happy while keeping those below him from losing passion. He knew how to pick his battles, and believed in doing the right thing for both customers and his team. But he also knew that getting himself fired wouldn't do his "leaf nodes" (like me) any good, so he didn't let us run wild with every cool idea that popped into our heads. If the idea had value, though, and was the right thing for customers, he would help us figure out a way (even if it was through a sneaky back door) to make it happen, or at least plant the seeds of possibility. 12:44:12 AM    comment []