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.
A new autumn has brought another burst of red and yellow leaves. And it has also brought an interesting new idea about why trees put on this show every year.
In recent years, scientists have been roughly divided into two camps when it comes to autumn leaves. One camp holds that autumn colors are just part of preparations for winter. The other holds that the colors are a warning to insects to stay away.
The warning hypothesis came from the late biologist William Hamilton. He pointed out that trees fight off insect larvae with toxins. A more vigorous tree could produce more toxins than a weaker one. It could also produce more vibrant colors in the fall by producing more pigment molecules. (The red in leaves is created by molecules called anthocyanins, for example). Perhaps a tree could send a message to insects looking for a place to lay their eggs: stay away from me or I'll kill your kids in the spring.
Insects that could recognize this signal benefited by staying away, laying their eggs on weaker trees. And brighter leaves were in turn favored, since trees that produced them didn't have to struggle so much with insects devouring their equipment for gathering sunlight. Hamilton and other scientists put his warning hypothesis to the tests, and they found some hints that he was right. The color of leaves, for example, did seem to influence where insects chose to lay their eggs.
But scientists who study the physiology of trees weren't sold. They came at the question of autumn colors from another direction: they studied the molecules that create the colors. During autumn, leaves dismantle their green chlorophyll and pump the nutrients back into their branches. It's a vulnerable time in a tree's life, because it becomes vulnerable to damage from ultraviolet rays. Anthocyanins and other pigment molecules protect leaves by absorbing the damage caused by UV rays, so that the dwindling chlorphyll in a leaf can continue to generate the energy required for winter preparations. (For more details, see my article last fall in the Times.)
Everyone in the debate that I spoke to agreed that there was a lot left to learn about autumn leaves, and as I mentined here, it was even possible that they might be the result of several different forces working together. And in a paper in press at the journal Bioessays, University of Frieburg biologist H. Martin Schaefer and his student Gregor Rolshausen have come up with a way to account for a lot of the evidence offered up by both camps. The core of their argument is that autumn leaves are cues, not signals.
This may all sound more like semiotics than botany, but there's some real science here. Schaefer and Rolhausen point out that the molecules that give leaves their fall colors and the molecules that defend leaves against insects have a lot in common. In order to make some toxins, a tree actually starts out using the same recipe for making anthocyanins. Only relatively late in the process does it alter the recipe to produce toxins (which are colorless, unlike anthocyaninins). Other toxins are made with a completely different recipe, but they have another link to anthocyanins. These molecules are very delicate, and are easily damaged by sunlight, and they need anthocyanins to protect them.
Schaefer and Rolshausen argue that the primary function of anthocyanins is not to ward off insects. Its main job is to shield leaves from radiation. It just so happens that a tree with a lot of colorful anthocyanin is probably also a tree with a lot of colorless toxins. One reason is that a tree that is physically capable of producing lots of anthocyanins can also produce lots of toxins that use an almost identical recipe. Another reason is that a lot of anthocyanins can protect other toxins, so that they can attack insects.
Insects can't see toxins, but they can see reds and yellows produced in autumn leaves. And anthocyanins may be reliable cues about how dangerous a tree will be to an insect's eggs. While it's a cue, Schaefer and Rolshausen argue, it's not a signal that's directed to the bugs.
By linking autumn colors to insect defense, Schaefer and Rolshausen can account for a lot of the evidence amassed so far. But their new hypothesis won't win the day until more experiments can find more support for it than for the previous ones. It may even turn out that other forces are also at play. I suspect that many more autumn leaves will fall to the ground before scientists have worked them all out.
Carl, we're getting into very deep water here. Does a signal require an attempt to communicate, or is it something constructed in the behaviour of the beholder? Dennett, I think, would plump unequivocaly for the latter. In this, as in most things, he is merely making explicit assumptions that a lot of scientists hold. Signals, or informaiton more generally, are not properties of things in themselves, but of their interactions with the world.
I suppose the test, in evolutionary terms, would be to see whether the colouring of leaves was maintained only if it functioned as a signal: in other words, if it didn't protect against UV light as well. But since protection against UV light also increases the amount of some toxins, I don't see how the experiment could, even in theory, be done. There's a double effect that can't be disentangled.
2. Peter Ellis on October 31, 2005 03:52 AM writes...
The obvious approach, it seems to me, would be to study the sequence of anthocyanin-producing genes and the toxin-producing genes in a range of different species.
That might tell you whether the colours came first or the toxins came first, which would in turn be a clue to their function. The scenario described above looks very like one where a biological pathway producing pigment molecules for defence against UV was later extended to generate toxins
Heck, you could even look at the evolution of insect eye pigment genes. Maybe insects see red because tree leaves are red, not vice versa.
3. Bruce Amiata on October 31, 2005 07:40 AM writes...
Is it not also the case that most insects (the polinating ones, anyway) detect light shifted towards the blue, rather than the red? (Bird polinators, generally, are attracted to the red end of the spectrum). I wonder how much discrimination insects have from green through the yellow and red portion of the spectrum...
My understanding of colour change was given to me in 1960 by my Botany teachers. Put simply, abscission cells at the base of each leaf slowly grow if a leaf uses more sugar than it creates. As the green chlorophyll deteriotes the underlying colour become more evident until the leaves dry and drop. The rationale then, was that the leaves would be a liability as they would increase the "top hamper" effect during the winter gales.
"Perhaps a tree could send a message to insects looking for a place to lay their eggs: stay away from me or I'll kill your kids in the spring."
How would that work? The leaves would have died and be well on their way to become leaf mould.
This is an example of over complication. Dare I suggest that the simple explanation is probably the more correct, however, you chaps are very fortunate to have such beautiful colours at this time of the year. In NW London, our trees just seem to go yellow and drop. No maples!
I’ve enjoyed all your stories about the autumn colours, thanks for bringing such a cool topic to the attention of your readers.
If one of the co-evolutionary theories is actually going on it would be cool to find trees that cheat. That is, trees that don’t produce toxins or use colours for ‘honest signalling’ like Hamilton’s idea but freeload on the effort put in by other tress doing those things. Once aphids avoid red leaves you might get away with just producing red leaves to reduce your parasite load.
6. Patrick Foss on November 2, 2005 12:11 PM writes...
Does anyone know if the colorless toxins are also odorless? Saying that the color alone deterred the insects may lead to an erroneous assuption that the color was responsible when in fact it may indeed be incidental and that the odor or taste of the toxins are apparent to an insect when it first lands on the tree.
Carl,
I'm don't study these thing scientifically, but the aborists/foresters here in Wisconsin tell us that a tree which colors early, or much brighter than similar surrounding trees is under some kind of stress, including drought and insect attacks. Can you: a. dispute/corroborate this and/or
b. include it in your theory?
8. Rob Bate on November 6, 2005 11:59 PM writes...
The summer color of trees is a combination of chlorophyll, which is a deep blueish green, carotene, a yellow orange as in carrots and anthocyanin. the red described above. The rich blue/green coupled with the yellow orange and red mix into the relatively neutral yellow green common to most midsummer leaves.
I assumed that when the chlorophyll was reabsorbed or broke down the yellows, oranges and reds were left as a beautiful, but essentially functionless, byproduct. Has any purposeful use of fall color been established?
hi...
am a final year botany student. i wish to get some information regarding poilnators in birds. this is for my thesis work. kindly help me if possible.
thankyou
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.
A new autumn has brought another burst of red and yellow leaves. And it has also brought an interesting new idea about why trees put on this show every year.
1. Andrew Brown on October 31, 2005 03:38 AM writes...
Carl, we're getting into very deep water here. Does a signal require an attempt to communicate, or is it something constructed in the behaviour of the beholder? Dennett, I think, would plump unequivocaly for the latter. In this, as in most things, he is merely making explicit assumptions that a lot of scientists hold. Signals, or informaiton more generally, are not properties of things in themselves, but of their interactions with the world.
I suppose the test, in evolutionary terms, would be to see whether the colouring of leaves was maintained only if it functioned as a signal: in other words, if it didn't protect against UV light as well. But since protection against UV light also increases the amount of some toxins, I don't see how the experiment could, even in theory, be done. There's a double effect that can't be disentangled.
Permalink to Comment2. Peter Ellis on October 31, 2005 03:52 AM writes...
The obvious approach, it seems to me, would be to study the sequence of anthocyanin-producing genes and the toxin-producing genes in a range of different species.
That might tell you whether the colours came first or the toxins came first, which would in turn be a clue to their function. The scenario described above looks very like one where a biological pathway producing pigment molecules for defence against UV was later extended to generate toxins
Heck, you could even look at the evolution of insect eye pigment genes. Maybe insects see red because tree leaves are red, not vice versa.
Permalink to Comment3. Bruce Amiata on October 31, 2005 07:40 AM writes...
Is it not also the case that most insects (the polinating ones, anyway) detect light shifted towards the blue, rather than the red? (Bird polinators, generally, are attracted to the red end of the spectrum). I wonder how much discrimination insects have from green through the yellow and red portion of the spectrum...
Permalink to Comment4. Perry on October 31, 2005 11:17 AM writes...
My understanding of colour change was given to me in 1960 by my Botany teachers. Put simply, abscission cells at the base of each leaf slowly grow if a leaf uses more sugar than it creates. As the green chlorophyll deteriotes the underlying colour become more evident until the leaves dry and drop. The rationale then, was that the leaves would be a liability as they would increase the "top hamper" effect during the winter gales.
"Perhaps a tree could send a message to insects looking for a place to lay their eggs: stay away from me or I'll kill your kids in the spring."
How would that work? The leaves would have died and be well on their way to become leaf mould.
This is an example of over complication. Dare I suggest that the simple explanation is probably the more correct, however, you chaps are very fortunate to have such beautiful colours at this time of the year. In NW London, our trees just seem to go yellow and drop. No maples!
Permalink to Comment5. David Winter on October 31, 2005 11:40 PM writes...
Carl,
I’ve enjoyed all your stories about the autumn colours, thanks for bringing such a cool topic to the attention of your readers.
If one of the co-evolutionary theories is actually going on it would be cool to find trees that cheat. That is, trees that don’t produce toxins or use colours for ‘honest signalling’ like Hamilton’s idea but freeload on the effort put in by other tress doing those things. Once aphids avoid red leaves you might get away with just producing red leaves to reduce your parasite load.
Permalink to Comment6. Patrick Foss on November 2, 2005 12:11 PM writes...
Does anyone know if the colorless toxins are also odorless? Saying that the color alone deterred the insects may lead to an erroneous assuption that the color was responsible when in fact it may indeed be incidental and that the odor or taste of the toxins are apparent to an insect when it first lands on the tree.
Permalink to Comment7. Gene Norman on November 2, 2005 06:24 PM writes...
Carl,
Permalink to CommentI'm don't study these thing scientifically, but the aborists/foresters here in Wisconsin tell us that a tree which colors early, or much brighter than similar surrounding trees is under some kind of stress, including drought and insect attacks. Can you: a. dispute/corroborate this and/or
b. include it in your theory?
8. Rob Bate on November 6, 2005 11:59 PM writes...
The summer color of trees is a combination of chlorophyll, which is a deep blueish green, carotene, a yellow orange as in carrots and anthocyanin. the red described above. The rich blue/green coupled with the yellow orange and red mix into the relatively neutral yellow green common to most midsummer leaves.
I assumed that when the chlorophyll was reabsorbed or broke down the yellows, oranges and reds were left as a beautiful, but essentially functionless, byproduct. Has any purposeful use of fall color been established?
Permalink to Comment9. mathew on January 8, 2006 10:38 AM writes...
hi...
Permalink to Commentam a final year botany student. i wish to get some information regarding poilnators in birds. this is for my thesis work. kindly help me if possible.
thankyou