Corante: technology, business, media, law, and culture news from the blogosphere
OUR PUBLICATIONS:
Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.
Corante Blogs
Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Corante Developments
Here you will find the latest news from Corante including updates on upcoming events, new initiatives, product and publication launches, and more.
It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.
I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.
He was also, it should be said, a kind and thoughtful soul and it was the rare conversation in which he didn't ask, with sincerity, about what he knew of my life, e.g. our new babe, and we didn't talk as seemingly old friends about our lives and respective paths. I can't say I knew him very well, of course, but in our half-dozen get-togethers over the years and dozens of conversations I got a good sense of the man: he cared about learning and sharing and his bearing was earnest and ego-less and we'll miss him for that and more.
We wanted to let you know about a discount to New Comm Forum, the annual event event put on by our friends at the Society for New Communications Research. The conference, which runs from April 22-25, will feature many of the field's leading observers and is an important event for those looking, in the words of SNCR, to "better understand new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society."
Check out the event's website and, if you're interested in attending, be sure to use the code supplied below for a special discount.
EARLY BIRD PRICING - NOW UNTIL FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $995.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $195.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
REGULAR PRICING - AFTER FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $1095.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $249.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
CORANTE READER DISCOUNTS
NewComm Forum Conference - save an additional $100
Use discount code: NCF08100
Pre-conference or post-conference session - save an additional $45.
Use discount code: NCF0845
We've been remiss in letting you know about two new independent blogs we've helped launch in the past month or so.
The first - the ConversationHub - is a companion blog to Supernova 2007, the latest edition of Kevin Werbach's excellent conference on all things connected. As the conference site says: "Supernova examines the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy. As disparate physical and social networks link with one another, a new societal network is rapidly evolving... The New Network is greater than the sum of its parts. It challenges us to re-create everything from the software and hardware we use...to the business models we employ...to the information and entertainment we encounter...to the ways we work and play."
Visit the ConversationHub and you'll find several dozen leading thinkers and doers, led by a few notable ringleaders, weighing in on the themes and trends of the day in technology and business. We encourage you to tune in - feel free to comment and even suggest topics and ideas for posts.
The second blog - Mobile Messaging 2.0 - convenes about a dozen top observers of the mobile messaging space for an intense discussion of the industry and where it's headed. Among its contributors are leading commentators, journalists and players in the field - tune in and you'll find them touching on topics such as mobile device design, messaging platforms, market pressures, user-generated content, interface design, and much, much more.
Also, if you visit the site, which is sponsored by Airwide Solutions, this week, you'll find live coverage and commentary from Global Messaging 2007, to which several of our contributors have traveled to hear about the latest developments from a broad spectrum of the industry's players and providers.
Be sure to catch the Office 2.0 Conference and hear from and engage with leading thinkers and doers in this exciting new market. Find out more here and be sure to use the code "GLDRK" for a special discount for Corante readers.
In the Pipeline: Don't miss Derek Lowe's excellent commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry in general at In the Pipeline
So let’s recap: It’s been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive people that some claim belong to a new branch of hominid evolution and skeptics claim were just small humans. We seem to have entered a lull in the flow of new scientific information about Homo floresiensis. The last thing we heard from its discoverers came in March, when they published scans of the Homo floresiensis braincase, which bolstered their case that the skull they found didn’t happen to belong to someone with a birth defect. The skeptics have made various noises about evidence that the fossils are indeed pathological, and thus can’t be the basis for recognizing a new species. They have told reporters about their visits to pygmies who live near the fossil site on the Indonesian island of Flores. But they have yet to publish any of this in a scientific journal, where their claims could be put to some serious scrutiny. For example, you can’t refute the claim that the fossils are a separate hominid species by showing that living pygmies on Flores are very short. You also have to deal with the odd body proportions of Homo floresiensis, such as its long arms. Perhaps these are pathological too, but no one has gone on the scientific record yet.
For now Homo floresiensis junkies like myself have to content ourselves with scraps: the various details of the nasty battles between the discoverers of the fossils and their foe, Teuku Jacob, grand old man of Indonesian anthrolopology and lead skeptic. An article in today’s Los Angeles Times, offers the latest overview of the squabbles. If you are new these misadventures, it’s pretty good way to catch up. For those who keep up on this stuff, I see a couple interesting new tidbits.
1. A lot of Teuku Jacob's arguments against this being a new species seem wacky to me, at least as they've been presented in the press. In the LA Times, he "argues that evolution cannot 'go backward' and produce a human with a smaller brain." Perhaps Jacob will eventually make this case at length in a scientific paper, but for now I'd just say that there's no Law of the Perpetually Increasing Brain that I'm familiar with. In fact, the mammal brain is surprisingly malleable over the course of evolution. This afternoon I will try to write up a post on a new study that makes this clear. UPDATE 6/16: Read it here.
2. Teuku Jacob took possession over the bones for a few months, and when he returned them, their discoverers claimed the delicate fossils were damaged. The damages included what appeared to be an attempt to reconstruct the jaw.
In the LA Times piece, one of the co-authors of the original Homo floresiensis report accused Jacob of trying to make the skull look more like a member of our own species (the other hominid species that lived in Indonesia, Homo erectus, had a weaker jaw).
For the first time that I’m aware of, Jacob admits that he was trying to “improve” the skull. "We tried to improve some of the things," he acknowledged. "We didn't damage any bones. Actually, we improved some." Improve, or match your preconceptions?
3. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the controversy has now resulted in a complete halt to digging in the cave where the original fossils were found. Apparently the team that discovered the fossils didn’t get the proper permits from the Indonesian Institute of Science, although they believed they had. Now the Institute has decided that digging should stop, so that the dispute won’t get worse. While I can only judge this decision from a brief summary in a news article, the logic behind it baffles me. I doubt that forcing scientists to cool their heels while clues to what could be one of the most important discoveries in human evolution wait to be found on Flores will put them in a more pleasant mood. What’s more, digging in the cave could yield evidence that can settle this dispute once and for all—such as DNA, the odds of finding may have gone up thanks to the invention of new methods for culling it from the environment.
It's frustrating to know that we could be enjoying a scientific feast, when all that's on the menu for the foreseeable future are scraps like these.
Indonesians are quite sensitive about foreign scientists studying 'their' culture. In addition, Islam is generally anti-evolution, at least in its more fundamentalist forms. Prof. Jacob clearly drew his conclusions before seeing the specimens, and has since been defending his preconceived classification of the specimens as H. sapiens. It is no surprise to me that he is strongly backed by the Indonesian government, academia and press. Pak Jacob is a revered figure in Indonesian academic circles, and it is no surprise that academia and government institutions would rally around him. Indonesian culture is much more respectful toward academics and elders than is western culture. The permit denial by LIPI is not at all surprising.
I'd like to hear thoughts on Jacob's motivations in this dispute. Political? Religious? Ego? I don't know enough about the man to judge...but I'm surprised to see a "grand old man of Indonesian anthrolopology" seemingly impeding science in such a way.
4. Jason Malloy on June 15, 2005 03:04 PM writes...
Oh my god, this Jacob guy is a lunatic. Almost the entire animal kingdom has been "backward evolving", for 200,000, as body sizes and brain cases have been shriking in a global pattern. The whole concept of "backward evolving" is scientific junk. The Flores "pathological" argument, if really continuing, reminds me of Creationists who say neanderthals were just humans with arthritis. The pictures of the microcephalic skull and brain compared with the Flores skull and brain and an Erectus skull and brain are publically available. The Flores skull has huge, angular and robust erectine brows and jaw (unlike the microcephalic). The microcephalic brain is smooth and pathological, the Flores brain cast looks nothing like the pathological brain and shares all the distinctive but normal features of the larger erectus brain cast.
What is truly frightening is that someone who seems to get granted at least a modicum of credibility as a scientist clings to the notion that "evolution" means "improvement" (measured only by his own subjective opinion) rather than "adaptation" to environment.
(That's why, for example, the ID crowd has such tiny brains. Their environment doesn't require that particular adaptation to be viable and successful in their ecological niche...)
The gossip I've heard about the odd behaviour of the Indonesians (seizing of skeleton, denying digging permits etc.) largely centres around strong political influence coming from other camps in Australia (there's quite a turf war, both intellectual and geographical, going on over this). Sad when people's egos and determination to be 'right' impede science.
Jacob's team, more reprehensibly, damaged the pelvis beyound repair. This affects the ability of researchers to reconstruct the stance of the Hobbit (I really hate that name), and also to determine if the birth canal matches the head morphology. [According to Colin Groves, a primatologist and specialist in human evolution.]
I wasn't suggesting that Pak Jacob himself is an Islamic creationist, but that the structure of Indonesian science institutions including LIPI has an anti-evolutionary bias.
The whole situation sounds a bit like the three stooges tackling paleoanthropology to me. One wonders if its worth all the trouble? Can an unfossilized deformed skull possibly live up to the crown of "missing link"?
Another skeptic who may have better credentials than Jacob, Professor Maciej Henneberg points out emphatically that among the remains, there is only a single skull. This leaves open the possibility of a pathological explanation. This short debate on Australia's Lateline is entertaining and a little informative. Its also amusing when "hobbit" team member Professor Richard Roberts breaks down towards the end as he defends his position. The entire scenario illustrates a major problem in the field of human evolution. Researchers often seem to lose their objectivity to "protect" their evolutionary niche. Rather than cooperation to find the ultimate truth they resort to selfish and petty tactics to be the first to publish. Its the yellow journalism of science.
yew darwinianists har all gonna BURN IN HELL dontchew know there are no proof dinosuars cos "dinosuar" fossils har all unfotunate peoples with bad case of dinosuarism, arthritis and hooping cough
12. Jason Malloy on June 16, 2005 04:26 AM writes...
"Can an unfossilized deformed skull possibly live up to the crown of "missing link"?"
This is misleading. The question isn't about "the missing link" but if the bones are human or hominid. There is only 1 skull but there are other bones from 6 separate specimens. The skull isn't the only part of the skeleton with pertinent information. The brain cast is nearly identical to the erectus brain cast, and the non-skull bones are distinctly erectine:
" . . . It has a suite of clearly archaic traits which are replicated in a variety of early hominids and these archaic traits are not found in any abnormal humans which have ever been recorded. We now have the remains of 5 or 6 other individuals from the site, so it's not just one. There's a population of these things now and they all share the same features."
A pathology explanation appears highly in doubt.
Further the issue goes beyond this scientific debate to the issues of hording and damaging rare and priceless specimens, and abusing governmental authority to effectively cut-off further exploration.
14. Tom Metcalfe on June 16, 2005 07:04 AM writes...
I think the Australian research team might have been more cautious with their claims until more evidence was in. They have extensively pumped the television and news coverage of their discoveries, and long before we had the brain case scans (which themselves are open to some interpretation) we had the discoverers and their buddies at Discovery and Nature telling tales of a heroic hobbit race sailing the Pacific on rafts and hunting pygmy elephants, forming the basis for local legends, finding and destroying the Ring of Power, etc -- all this on the grounds of one skull. The science has been hidden by spin.
15. Torfinn Ørmen on June 16, 2005 04:43 PM writes...
Something is very odd. If quoted correctly Jacob is now saying that the damage to the bones happened on the way to Yogyakarta (when the bones were in Jacob's custody), while he earlier said that it was the original researchers who were careless and damaged the bones themselves. Prof. Henneberg saw the bones in Jacob's lab before they were returned and when asked (on a mailing list) he stated that the bones were not damaged when he saw them. Jacob has also denied that his people made casts, but one working in his lab has admitted to making a cast of the LB1 mandible. It looks like someone is not telling the whole truth about what happened.
"argues that evolution cannot 'go backward' and produce a human with a smaller brain."
It isn't a question of evolution going forward or backward, because evolution has no direction except towards better adaptation to the current environment.
People sometimes think evolution means everything is evolving with some concrete goal in mind--that organisms change only to become smarter, faster, stronger, or what have you. This is obviously what Teuku Jacob thinks, and he fits perfectly Ambrose Bierce's definition of positive: mistaken at the top of one's voice.
A being with a smaller, less complex brain requires a smaller amount of resources to support it than one with a larger, more complex brain. In an environment where resources are limited, a being that needs less will be more likely to survive. Thus, what Jacob calls "backward" is, in such an environment, actually going "forward" toward better adaptation to the environment.
Natural selection provides for survival of the species, not for how "advanced" a species can get before it goes extinct.
These remains are now the center of a substantial international controversy. Indonesia’s Professor Teuku Jacob, who had allegedly agreed to return the bones (to the Australian team which made the discovery) by 1 January this year, finally returned them on 23 February.
However, while the bones were in his custody, he permitted two other Australian scientists to study them in detail—Dr Alan Thorne of the Australian National University, and Professor Maciej Henneberg, of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at the University of Adelaide. The discoverers have protested loudly at the alleged impropriety of this pair studying ‘stolen remains’.
Following their three-day examination of the most complete specimen, Professor Henneberg said it confirmed his previous opinion, gained from studying the reports, that this was a modern human who had a brain-shrinking disorder called microcephaly. He is reported as saying that there is now ‘absolutely no doubt that this person had a growth disorder.’
Whether the tiny people of Flores were indeed microcephalic modern types, or whether they represent a pygmy version of so-called Homo erectus, the point is really the same. Namely, that there is no reason not to classify them all—the Flores inhabitants as well as H. erectus—as Homo sapiens—part of the range of variation found within a single species (see also Skull wars: new ‘Homo erectus’ skull in Ethiopia).
In fact, evolutionist Alan Thorne is one of those who, along with the University of Michigan’s Milford Wolpoff, has been saying for years to his paleoanthropological colleagues that, even though they believe that H. erectus evolved into modern humans, it is wrong to assign a separate species name to it. Thorne and Henneberg are natural allies in this; Henneberg has recently published his findings that if you bunch all the ‘apemen’ in together, they exhibit the range of variation one would normally find within a single species!
Henneberg M., de Miguel C., Hominins are a single lineage: brain and body size variability does not reflect postulated taxonomic diversity of hominins, Homo. 55(1–2):21–37, 2004.
A stunning photo that really makes one think abt M130 and brain qualities (regardless of size)!
OK that put aside this is all about protecting Islam and yes, Teuku Jacob is a crypto-creationist in line with the usual balancing between fundamentalism and an Islam that pretends being modern (By the way, Australia has already a law making it impossible to critisize Islam!).
Take a look at Out of Africa as Pygmies and back as global "Mongoloids". Maybe the Hobbit represents the first OOA-delivey of a more wrinkled brain that later replaced all the other?
19. Jason Malloy on June 25, 2005 06:19 PM writes...
"OK that put aside this is all about protecting Islam and yes, Teuku Jacob is a crypto-creationist in line with the usual balancing between fundamentalism and an Islam that pretends being modern"
At least try to have an ounce of real evidence beyond someone's ethnicity if you are going to make wild accusations like this. If he was a Creationist he would've arranged for Duane Gish or William Dembski to analyze the bones, not Alan Thorne and Maciej Henneberg*.
Corante: technology, business, media, law, and culture news from the blogosphere
OUR PUBLICATIONS:
Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.
Corante Blogs
Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Corante Developments
Here you will find the latest news from Corante including updates on upcoming events, new initiatives, product and publication launches, and more.
It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.
I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.
He was also, it should be said, a kind and thoughtful soul and it was the rare conversation in which he didn't ask, with sincerity, about what he knew of my life, e.g. our new babe, and we didn't talk as seemingly old friends about our lives and respective paths. I can't say I knew him very well, of course, but in our half-dozen get-togethers over the years and dozens of conversations I got a good sense of the man: he cared about learning and sharing and his bearing was earnest and ego-less and we'll miss him for that and more.
We wanted to let you know about a discount to New Comm Forum, the annual event event put on by our friends at the Society for New Communications Research. The conference, which runs from April 22-25, will feature many of the field's leading observers and is an important event for those looking, in the words of SNCR, to "better understand new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society."
Check out the event's website and, if you're interested in attending, be sure to use the code supplied below for a special discount.
EARLY BIRD PRICING - NOW UNTIL FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $995.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $195.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
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So let’s recap: It’s been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of 
1. William Dyson on June 15, 2005 10:59 AM writes...
Neanderthals had a larger brain than modern humans, yet they did not survive. This may be another case of "backward" evolution.
Permalink to Comment2. Tom Kimmerer on June 15, 2005 12:13 PM writes...
Indonesians are quite sensitive about foreign scientists studying 'their' culture. In addition, Islam is generally anti-evolution, at least in its more fundamentalist forms. Prof. Jacob clearly drew his conclusions before seeing the specimens, and has since been defending his preconceived classification of the specimens as H. sapiens. It is no surprise to me that he is strongly backed by the Indonesian government, academia and press. Pak Jacob is a revered figure in Indonesian academic circles, and it is no surprise that academia and government institutions would rally around him. Indonesian culture is much more respectful toward academics and elders than is western culture. The permit denial by LIPI is not at all surprising.
Permalink to Comment3. Linguist on June 15, 2005 12:21 PM writes...
I'd like to hear thoughts on Jacob's motivations in this dispute. Political? Religious? Ego? I don't know enough about the man to judge...but I'm surprised to see a "grand old man of Indonesian anthrolopology" seemingly impeding science in such a way.
Permalink to Comment4. Jason Malloy on June 15, 2005 03:04 PM writes...
Oh my god, this Jacob guy is a lunatic. Almost the entire animal kingdom has been "backward evolving", for 200,000, as body sizes and brain cases have been shriking in a global pattern. The whole concept of "backward evolving" is scientific junk. The Flores "pathological" argument, if really continuing, reminds me of Creationists who say neanderthals were just humans with arthritis. The pictures of the microcephalic skull and brain compared with the Flores skull and brain and an Erectus skull and brain are publically available. The Flores skull has huge, angular and robust erectine brows and jaw (unlike the microcephalic). The microcephalic brain is smooth and pathological, the Flores brain cast looks nothing like the pathological brain and shares all the distinctive but normal features of the larger erectus brain cast.
Permalink to Comment5. Jason Malloy on June 15, 2005 03:08 PM writes...
Tom and Linguist,
It has nothing to do with Islamic Creationism on Dr. Jacob's part. If you are looking for the motive, Dr. Jacob is a multiregionalist.
Permalink to Comment6. Milo Johnson on June 15, 2005 03:13 PM writes...
What is truly frightening is that someone who seems to get granted at least a modicum of credibility as a scientist clings to the notion that "evolution" means "improvement" (measured only by his own subjective opinion) rather than "adaptation" to environment.
(That's why, for example, the ID crowd has such tiny brains. Their environment doesn't require that particular adaptation to be viable and successful in their ecological niche...)
Permalink to Comment7. Jacqui on June 15, 2005 04:12 PM writes...
The gossip I've heard about the odd behaviour of the Indonesians (seizing of skeleton, denying digging permits etc.) largely centres around strong political influence coming from other camps in Australia (there's quite a turf war, both intellectual and geographical, going on over this). Sad when people's egos and determination to be 'right' impede science.
Permalink to Comment8. John Wilkins on June 15, 2005 09:06 PM writes...
Jacob's team, more reprehensibly, damaged the pelvis beyound repair. This affects the ability of researchers to reconstruct the stance of the Hobbit (I really hate that name), and also to determine if the birth canal matches the head morphology. [According to Colin Groves, a primatologist and specialist in human evolution.]
Permalink to Comment9. Tom Kimmerer on June 15, 2005 10:05 PM writes...
I wasn't suggesting that Pak Jacob himself is an Islamic creationist, but that the structure of Indonesian science institutions including LIPI has an anti-evolutionary bias.
Permalink to Comment10. Jim on June 16, 2005 03:06 AM writes...
The whole situation sounds a bit like the three stooges tackling paleoanthropology to me. One wonders if its worth all the trouble? Can an unfossilized deformed skull possibly live up to the crown of "missing link"?
Permalink to CommentAnother skeptic who may have better credentials than Jacob, Professor Maciej Henneberg points out emphatically that among the remains, there is only a single skull. This leaves open the possibility of a pathological explanation. This short debate on Australia's Lateline is entertaining and a little informative. Its also amusing when "hobbit" team member Professor Richard Roberts breaks down towards the end as he defends his position. The entire scenario illustrates a major problem in the field of human evolution. Researchers often seem to lose their objectivity to "protect" their evolutionary niche. Rather than cooperation to find the ultimate truth they resort to selfish and petty tactics to be the first to publish. Its the yellow journalism of science.
11. snaxalotl on June 16, 2005 03:45 AM writes...
yew darwinianists har all gonna BURN IN HELL dontchew know there are no proof dinosuars cos "dinosuar" fossils har all unfotunate peoples with bad case of dinosuarism, arthritis and hooping cough
Permalink to Comment12. Jason Malloy on June 16, 2005 04:26 AM writes...
"Can an unfossilized deformed skull possibly live up to the crown of "missing link"?"
This is misleading. The question isn't about "the missing link" but if the bones are human or hominid. There is only 1 skull but there are other bones from 6 separate specimens. The skull isn't the only part of the skeleton with pertinent information. The brain cast is nearly identical to the erectus brain cast, and the non-skull bones are distinctly erectine:
" . . . It has a suite of clearly archaic traits which are replicated in a variety of early hominids and these archaic traits are not found in any abnormal humans which have ever been recorded. We now have the remains of 5 or 6 other individuals from the site, so it's not just one. There's a population of these things now and they all share the same features."
A pathology explanation appears highly in doubt.
Further the issue goes beyond this scientific debate to the issues of hording and damaging rare and priceless specimens, and abusing governmental authority to effectively cut-off further exploration.
Permalink to Comment13. Jason Malloy on June 16, 2005 04:30 AM writes...
My links never work. Here they are in order of appearance:
http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2005/03/03/the_hobbits_brain.php
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/print/1998
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=00082F87-7D35-117E-BD3583414B7F0000&pageNumber=2&catID=4
Heh. Dinosaurism.
Permalink to Comment14. Tom Metcalfe on June 16, 2005 07:04 AM writes...
I think the Australian research team might have been more cautious with their claims until more evidence was in. They have extensively pumped the television and news coverage of their discoveries, and long before we had the brain case scans (which themselves are open to some interpretation) we had the discoverers and their buddies at Discovery and Nature telling tales of a heroic hobbit race sailing the Pacific on rafts and hunting pygmy elephants, forming the basis for local legends, finding and destroying the Ring of Power, etc -- all this on the grounds of one skull. The science has been hidden by spin.
Permalink to Comment15. Torfinn Ørmen on June 16, 2005 04:43 PM writes...
Something is very odd. If quoted correctly Jacob is now saying that the damage to the bones happened on the way to Yogyakarta (when the bones were in Jacob's custody), while he earlier said that it was the original researchers who were careless and damaged the bones themselves. Prof. Henneberg saw the bones in Jacob's lab before they were returned and when asked (on a mailing list) he stated that the bones were not damaged when he saw them. Jacob has also denied that his people made casts, but one working in his lab has admitted to making a cast of the LB1 mandible. It looks like someone is not telling the whole truth about what happened.
Permalink to Comment16. Kyra on June 16, 2005 10:22 PM writes...
"argues that evolution cannot 'go backward' and produce a human with a smaller brain."
It isn't a question of evolution going forward or backward, because evolution has no direction except towards better adaptation to the current environment.
People sometimes think evolution means everything is evolving with some concrete goal in mind--that organisms change only to become smarter, faster, stronger, or what have you. This is obviously what Teuku Jacob thinks, and he fits perfectly Ambrose Bierce's definition of positive: mistaken at the top of one's voice.
A being with a smaller, less complex brain requires a smaller amount of resources to support it than one with a larger, more complex brain. In an environment where resources are limited, a being that needs less will be more likely to survive. Thus, what Jacob calls "backward" is, in such an environment, actually going "forward" toward better adaptation to the environment.
Natural selection provides for survival of the species, not for how "advanced" a species can get before it goes extinct.
Permalink to Comment17. david on June 18, 2005 10:27 AM writes...
These remains are now the center of a substantial international controversy. Indonesia’s Professor Teuku Jacob, who had allegedly agreed to return the bones (to the Australian team which made the discovery) by 1 January this year, finally returned them on 23 February.
However, while the bones were in his custody, he permitted two other Australian scientists to study them in detail—Dr Alan Thorne of the Australian National University, and Professor Maciej Henneberg, of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at the University of Adelaide. The discoverers have protested loudly at the alleged impropriety of this pair studying ‘stolen remains’.
Following their three-day examination of the most complete specimen, Professor Henneberg said it confirmed his previous opinion, gained from studying the reports, that this was a modern human who had a brain-shrinking disorder called microcephaly. He is reported as saying that there is now ‘absolutely no doubt that this person had a growth disorder.’
http://smh.com.au/news/Science/Hobbit-just-a-little-man-with-small-brain/2005/02/18/1108709439138.html
Whether the tiny people of Flores were indeed microcephalic modern types, or whether they represent a pygmy version of so-called Homo erectus, the point is really the same. Namely, that there is no reason not to classify them all—the Flores inhabitants as well as H. erectus—as Homo sapiens—part of the range of variation found within a single species (see also Skull wars: new ‘Homo erectus’ skull in Ethiopia).
In fact, evolutionist Alan Thorne is one of those who, along with the University of Michigan’s Milford Wolpoff, has been saying for years to his paleoanthropological colleagues that, even though they believe that H. erectus evolved into modern humans, it is wrong to assign a separate species name to it. Thorne and Henneberg are natural allies in this; Henneberg has recently published his findings that if you bunch all the ‘apemen’ in together, they exhibit the range of variation one would normally find within a single species!
Henneberg M., de Miguel C., Hominins are a single lineage: brain and body size variability does not reflect postulated taxonomic diversity of hominins, Homo. 55(1–2):21–37, 2004.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15553266
Permalink to Comment18. Peter Klevius on June 25, 2005 05:37 PM writes...
A stunning photo that really makes one think abt M130 and brain qualities (regardless of size)!
OK that put aside this is all about protecting Islam and yes, Teuku Jacob is a crypto-creationist in line with the usual balancing between fundamentalism and an Islam that pretends being modern (By the way, Australia has already a law making it impossible to critisize Islam!).
Take a look at Out of Africa as Pygmies and back as global "Mongoloids". Maybe the Hobbit represents the first OOA-delivey of a more wrinkled brain that later replaced all the other?
Permalink to Comment19. Jason Malloy on June 25, 2005 06:19 PM writes...
"OK that put aside this is all about protecting Islam and yes, Teuku Jacob is a crypto-creationist in line with the usual balancing between fundamentalism and an Islam that pretends being modern"
At least try to have an ounce of real evidence beyond someone's ethnicity if you are going to make wild accusations like this. If he was a Creationist he would've arranged for Duane Gish or William Dembski to analyze the bones, not Alan Thorne and Maciej Henneberg*.
*http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2005/02/24/return_of_the_prodigal_bones.php
Permalink to Comment