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Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.

The Press Will Be Outsourced Before Stopped

Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media

Travels In Numerica Deserta

There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

Disrobing the Emperor: The online “user experience” isn't much of one

Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience

Second Life: What are the real numbers?

Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many

The democratisation of everything

Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor

RNA Interference: Film at Eleven

Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

PVP and the Honorable Enemy

Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."

From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game

Rats Rule, Right?

Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

Really BAD customer experience at Albertsons Market

Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience

The Guardian's "Comment is Free"

Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
In the Pipeline: Don't miss Derek Lowe's excellent commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry in general at In the Pipeline

The Loom

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April 13, 2005

Humanity's Map

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Posted by Carl Zimmer

human map.gifThis morning the New York Times reported that the National Geographic Society has launched the Genographic Project, which will collect DNA in order to reconstruct the past 100,000 years of human history.

I proceeded to shoot a good hour nosing around the site. The single best thing about it is an interactive map that allows you to trace the spread of humans across the world, based on studies on genetic markers. I'm working on a book about human evolution (more details to come), and I've gotten a blinding headache trying to keep studies on Y-chromosome markers in Ethiopian populations and mitochondrial DNA markers on the Andaman islands and all the rest of the studies out there straight in my head. Thank goodness somebody put them all in one place.

Of course, the project is much more than a pretty map: it's an ambitious piece of research. It's basically the brain child of Spencer Wells, a geneticist who wrote the excellent Journey of Man a few years ago. As of now, only about 10,000 people's DNA has been analyzed in studies on human migrations. Wells wants to crank that number up to 100,000. He's going to gather DNA from indigenous populations, and he's also inviting the public to get involved. You can buy a DNA kit, and when you send it back to the Genographic Project, you'll get a report on "your genetic journey" and the information will get added to Wells's database.

When Wells's book came out, I reviewed it for the New York Times Book Review. I gave it thumbs-up for the most part, although I felt that he had glided over the difficult ethical issues involved in these studies. The biotech industry is very interested in them, because they may point the way to new--and potentially profitable--medicines. An isolated population may have a pattern of genetic variation that sheds light on how a disease works its harm, or may have evolved a unique defense against a pathogen. When I wrote my review, Wells was a consultant to Genomics Collaborative, a private Massachusetts outfit that manages a medical collection of DNA and tissue samples from thousands of people around the world. It appears that he no longer is associated with them.

There's nothing wrong with this interest per se, but the fact is that it has led to some serious conficts. Critics have wondered why companies should be able to potentially reap great reward from the DNA of indigenous people, particularly when so many these groups face cultural extinction. DNA collections have in some cases ground to a halt because of these concerns. Wells didn't deal with tricky issues in The Journey of Man, which I thought was a mistake. That sort of omission, I think, only makes people unnecessarily suspicious.

The Genographic Project poses these sorts of ethical challenges once again, and it's good to see that Wells and his colleagues have confronted them head on. They have posted a long FAQ answering some of the big questions. No pharmaceutical companies are paying for the research. Instead, the Waitt Family Foundation has ponied up the cash for the fieldwork (to a total of $40 million), and IBM is supplying technology and PR.. Net proceeds from the sale of kits will go to education and conservation projects directed towards the indigenous peoples Wells will be working with. The identity of the DNA will remain confidential, but the database will not. Instead, it will be made free and public, along the lines of the Human Genome Project, so that any scientist can use it to study disease (or any other relevant question).

I'll bet that in a few years Wells will have another book to write from this experience. I hope that there's room in it this time for the ethics and the politics he's dealing with. That would help show just how relevant the wanderings of our ancestors 50,000 years ago are to our lives today.

Update 4 pm: Bad link fixed.

Comments (7) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Evolution


COMMENTS

1. The Commissar on April 13, 2005 03:20 PM writes...

The link to 'Genographic Project' doesn't work.

Links to NYT and the map are fine.

Can you describe better the results that will be available to 'non-indigenous' participants (most of us)? The FAQ didn't offer much on that.

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2. The Commissar on April 13, 2005 03:31 PM writes...

If you happen to look at my blog, you might be interested to note that 'Paul at Wizbang,' the blogger being excoriated in yesterday's post, is a noted anti-evolutionary creationist stalking horse. We've had a few pro- and anti- science debates over the past couple weeks.

Google "Wizbang Paul evolution" and you can track it from there.

Permalink to Comment

3. Pat Crenshaw on April 13, 2005 06:41 PM writes...

A minor note...National Geographic needs a good proof-reader. The "Era Overview" for the earliest era (200,000 years ago) cites the Lake Toba eruption caused worldwide temperatures to drop "by some 59 degrees Fahrenheit [15 degrees Celsius]".

You can see what happened. The researcher said 15 degrees Celsius, but the web-site producer figured he should convert it to F / it should have been converted as a 25-27 degree lowering of worldwide temperatures.

Permalink to Comment

4. Dienekes on April 13, 2005 08:19 PM writes...

>> he single best thing about it is an interactive map that allows you to trace the spread of humans across the world, based on studies on genetic markers.

This paper by Peter Underhill is a great introduction to what we know about the origin and migration of Y-chromosomal clades. It also has the necessary references for further study.

hpgl.stanford.edu/publications/Underhill_2004_p487-494.pdf

Permalink to Comment

5. John S Bolton on April 15, 2005 12:49 PM writes...

This is good that that the anti truth seekers mendacious sensitivities or ombudsmanship is not to stand in the way of those who care about the truth. The individuals in posession of the genetic diversity which is to be found can also be allowed to decide for themselves whether they want to participate. Are tribesmen to be presumed to be in need of an ombudsman of too precious racial sensitivity, or to exist only in collectivities with traditional representatives; but westerners can decide individually how their genetic information may be used. Once, we had brave truth seekers who endured hardships that the peddlers of racial sensitivity cannot even conceive of. How appropriate then, that an explorers' society should be the one to support this search; and not our corrupted and viciously racialized government science.

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6. George Bain on April 16, 2005 12:42 PM writes...

The maps are fine - BUT I cannot exactly relate them tp the work set out in P.A.Underhill,"Inferring Human History: Clues From Y-Chromosome Haplotypes" and the maps provided therein. For example, Haplogroup F is shown entering the area of Greece about -30K. I don't see that on the NatGeo maps, also the peopling of northern coast of Medfiterranean is not recorded; neither is the return to Africa of some groups - the Berberseg. Perhaps additional work will add and refine the maps. Where is there reference to Cavalli-Sforza?

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7. DEAN BEHNCKE on April 16, 2005 08:26 PM writes...

"Forced migraition due to the threat of warfare, ethnic cleansing & genocide has probably operated since ...7mya?"
XDT '99

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