Category: Technology

For decades, the word “fingerprint” has been used to denote a set of unique characteristics, whether literally the complex patterns of arches, loops, and whorls on one’s fingertips or entirely figuratively and more recently, the notion of a genetic fingerprint based on an analysis of an individual’s DNA sequence.

Most recently though, scientists have turned to another “omic” metabonomic fingerprinting using the analytical technique of NMR spectroscopy to obtain a unique view of an individual based on the complete range of metabolites produced by their body.

In the press release that discussed the research and in my follow-up news story on Spectroscopynow.com, there was an allusion to the idea that each one of the 6.7 billion people on earth would have a unique metabonomic fingerprint.

Such an identifier might have forensic, biometric, and medical diagnostics implications for us all. But, at the time of writing, I was curious as to how the team could possibly assert that every one of us would be unique, given that only a handful of volunteers had been screened. So, I asked team member Ivano Bertini to tell me a little more about how this might work.

“How can one extrapolate from a few tens of individuals that all 7 billion people on earth can each have a unique metabolic NMR fingerprint. The answer is of course that one cannot be sure!” he told me.

“We hinted at this possibility because it is a legitimate extrapolation to make,” he adds, “I can offer you some speculation along these lines. The proton NMR spectrum of the urine of any individual contains a large number of signals, and the spectrum is usually divided into a few hundreds of buckets (or bins). Let us say 400 of them contain signals. The height of the bin is proportional to the intensity of the signal(s) contained in it. If you simply allow each of these bins to assume two height values, individuals can be characterized by 2400 different ‘states’ of their bins, an astronomical number! Even if you allow for several bins being correlated because they contain different signals from the same metabolite, and assume an average of 4 bins reflecting the same metabolite, you only go down to 2100, still an astronomical number. If some metabolites change their amount in a correlated way this number can go down further, but keep in mind that the population on earth is less than 233!”

So, it does indeed look like each of us would be entirely metabolically unique. But, even if that turned out not to be the case and there were only a few hundred, or a few thousand, unique metabolic NMR fingerprints in the whole human population this would still be very useful to know.

“Think of how important it has been to identify a handful of blood types,” Bertini suggests, “Having a baseline metabolic profile for an individual would allow us to monitor changes due to the onset of a disease (early diagnosis) or the effect of a drug treatment and so have an early prediction of the response to a treatment.”

We all like to feel that we are unique, even twins have different actual fingerprints, it’s interesting to think that this may reach all the way down to the contents of your bladder.

Bernini, P., Bertini, I., Luchinat, C., Nepi, S., Saccenti, E., Schäfer, H., Schütz, B., Spraul, M., & Tenori, L. (2009). Individual Human Phenotypes in Metabolic Space and Time Journal of Proteome Research DOI: 10.1021/pr900344m

None of the new science books on my desk this morning are more than an inch thick, so they should make great lighweight packing for a summer holiday read.

First up, It Takes a Genome by Greg Gibson, Professor of Genetics at North Carolina State University at Raleigh, explains why a clash between our genes and modern life is making us sick. Gibson provides new insights into why we are facing new epidemics that were never a widespread problem for our ancestors, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, Crohn’s disease, asthma, arthritis. He also probes exactly what we mean by physical and emotional “normality” and suggests that the human genome might teach us one of the deepest lessons about the human condition yet.

Galileo’s New Universe as the title might suggest celebrates the 400th anniversary of the telescope by taking us on a tour of astronomical observation from that period to the modern day. Stephen Maran (ex-NASA) and Laurence Marschall (Gettysburg College) discuss the revolution that Galileo wrought in our understanding of the cosmos.

I met Max Perutz once, briefly, at an MRC media open day some time in the 1990s and I’ll tell anyone interested in knowing about the great man the packed lunch anecdote. That’s for another day, though, and it doesn’t get a mention in this posthumous “autobiography” of Perutz entitled What a Time I am Having. Compiled from his life’s letters and edited by his daughter Vivien, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the groundbreaking scientific happenings of the twentieth century and one of the key players.

Biocentrism by Robert Lanza CSO of Advanced Cell Technology with astronomer Bob Berman attempts to explain how life and consciousness are the keys to understanding the true nature of the universe. Lanza proposes a paradigm shift that essentially takes the quantum mechanics notion that the very act of making an observation affects the results of the experiment to the cosmic level. He suggests that life itself creates the universe, rather than life simply being an accident of the laws of physics.

Lanza’s book then is in contrast to Shadows on the Cave Wall: A New Theory of Evolution by Keith Ronald Skene, which arrived after I wrote this post. Skene’s idea is that physics needs to reclaim life and evolution from the biologists and chemists…

Lies, Damned Lies, and Science by science educator Sherry Seethaler turns on its head the idiom that statistics are always to blame for misunderstandings of a scientific nature and offers an escape route. She aims to help you sort through the noise surrounding global warming, the latest health claims, and scientific controversies. In Lies Seethaler explains the difference between cause and coincidence and shows you how to recognise lies, truthiness, and pseudo-expertise.

Most of you will be familiar with the concept of tools from primitive hand axes, clubs, and even prehistoric smoothie makers, we humans have used them for millennia (and if you’ve noticed several animals use them too).

Of course, our tools have grown exponentially more and more sophisticated, so much so that we now have tools we call machines that transport us from place to place, allow us to chat to people on the other side of the world, and of course allow us to sit hunched over a glowing panel like a lonely saddo writing inanely about whatever subject comes into our heads and hoping that someone will actually read our words…

Now, these tools, machines, they are now rather sophisticated and often take quite some mastering. My Dad, for instance, used to be a civil engineer, but is still reluctant to program my parents video recorder. Whereas my Mother is perfectly at home with half a dozen remote controls in her hands, uses SMS texting like a teenager and is the archetypal silver surfer now that she’s turned 70.

So, why is it that younger, otherwise highly intelligent people create for themselves an aura of technophobia? Why do I receive emails and hear people claiming to “not understand computers” on an almost daily basis? Well, no one is perfect certainly and some people have a greater affinity for these electronic tools than others…but in this so-called digital age and in an environment where understanding the basic concepts of information and communication technology is almost mandatory, that they’d get to grips with the fundamentals so that we can have a sensible conversation about blogs, RSS, Twitter, whatever, without one having to explain everything from first principles?

One contact recently added the phrase “whatever that is!!!” in an email talking about the web and email. Another asked me how to get an RSS for their website and wouldn’t hear of running blog software because it was all too much and they just wanted a simple site…

As some of you will know, I also run the SciScoop Science Forum and often point correspondents to that site as a possible outlet for their novel theories of how the universe formed or where Darwin, Einstein, Newton went wrong. One such correspondent told me that she couldn’t possibly submit the article to SciScoop because her “brain was fried” just working out how to login and she couldn’t navigate the meanderings of the submission system. (It’s a standard registration page and a post submission form, nothing particularly complicated).

Is this post just a rant about people who are less adept at using the common tools of the modern world? I suppose it is in one sense. But, what scares me is the pride with which many of the people who claim they don’t understand “computers” brandish their ignorance. There is much overlap between this group and the group that laughs when they explain how they’re no good at maths or never got science at school.

Why does it scare me? Well, humans have, since the aforementioned hand axe and probably before that used tools and we’ve always been curiosity driven, seeking out new knowledge…science in other words…so what is the problem?

Fine if you want to live outside the technological world we’re building, but the majority of the people with whom I engage and here these claims of technical and scientific ignorance are not living outside that world. They are corresponding or talking to me about technical matters, using sophisticated tools such as email and telephones to do so. RSS…Twitter…Logins…Computers in general, and the science that allowed these tools to be created are not some alien mission, they are the current state of evolution of human tool use.

I asked my good friend and fellow tech blogger Kim Woodbridge what she thought of this situation. “I encounter a lot of these people too,” she told me, “but I think there are a couple of other issues. There is this cool kid vs the geek mentality that still seems to exist well past high school and there is the anti-intellectualism attitude, at least in the US.”

She recalled that while working in tech support she and her colleagues were forever butting heads with the sales reps. “They were cool and we were geeks,” she says. “They wanted us to ‘just make it work’ and didn’t want to bother learning what it was that they might be doing wrong.”

Another contact suggested that the answer may lie in the two extremes of human types. “There are those who have an innate understanding of artificial machines,” she told me, “and then there are those people who have a natural gift for grasping things concerning living entities, with most people in between.” She confesses to being in awe of nature and longs to unravels its secrets but has no patience or empathy with machines.

To my mind, that attitude, which seems to be quite common, is just so bizarre. It’s not as if humans and the tools we make and use are not part of nature, just because they don’t photosynthesize or have fur. Anyway, I don’t think even ubergeeks empathise with their computers, although I have seen grown men weeping over a car they wrote off in a crash.

To my mind, our brains are perfectly adapted to using the tools humans create without pandering to some self-deprecating notion that being useless at computers is a good thing. It just takes an extra internal push to build up a little more momentum. Moreover, there are hundreds of web sites and courses available that can easily be accessed to improve the e-skillset of even the most spam-fisted Luddite. Most don’t even require a login although some might have an RSS newsfeed and…perish the thought…be on Twitter.

Postscript

It occurred to my while chatting over a glass of wine to friends after singing yesterday evening, that what I am getting at in this post is what Robert Persig tries to get across in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and that is the idea that you can actually get more out of life by accepting everything around you, which includes the tools you use, in Persig’s case the eponymous motorcycle and in my case, as far as this post goes, computers.

Persig is concerned that his co-riders are missing out by not getting to grips with the maintainance of their motorbikes. I guess I feel the same about the (mock) ignorance people feel about these electronic tools many of use on a day to day basis. But, I concede rage against those who don’t like machines is probably not very Zen.

Peace.

Are digital inclusion projects in the developing world booming or are they doomed to failure? That’s the question asked by legal expert Dinusha Mendis of the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK.

Mendis has investigated the digital divide in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria, and how laws such as those governing intellectual property rights and copyright might be acting as a barrier to narrowing the digital divide between the developing world and technologically mature nations.

“It is important to bridge the digital divide so that everyone can have equal rights to development, education, and freedom of expression,” Mendis explains. However, she asks whether developing nations can cope with stringent international laws and so embrace digital technology. Key to success is whether the governments of these countries can create the necessary laws and legal infrastructure to address the issues which arise from digital technology.

The concept of bridging the digital divide is not so much about access to technology, but about the benefits derived from access, explains Mendis. She points out that the divide exists not only between the developed and the developing world but also in many parts of the world between urban and poor rural communities. So, the implications of studying digitisation in developing nations may also have implications for millions of people in the developed world too.

To reap the rewards of making digital technology available to everyone, it is not simply a matter of providing access to gadgets but about empowering people to use the technology productively.

Mendis has investigated the results of three different projects. First, the GrameenPhone project (Bangladesh). GrameenPhone provides 250,000 “village” phones for the use of 148 million people who live in rural communities in Bangladesh. But, more than that, the project acted as the hub for an emerging rural economy. For instance, a poor woman with a bad credit history could borrow money from Grameen Bank to buy a handset and subscribe to cellular service. She could then make money renting out the phone to fellow villagers and extend her business network.

Ultimately, the phone becomes a productivity tool that could do as much to pull people out of poverty as a loan. For example, rather than walk to the next village in search of a doctor, people could call ahead. Instead of going in search of customers, a taxi driver can be called and his business thus expand. “The phone would likely produce more revenue than a cow, bought with a conventional bank loan, which can produce only so much milk,” Mendis explains.

The success of the GrameenPhone concept has now spread to other parts of the developing world, including Kenya and Tanzania, which now have their own rural banking systems based around the cellphone. In Kenya, Safaricom and Vodafone partnered to create the “mobile” banking system M-Pesa. M-Pesa is hugely successful and is now being used by farmers to pay traders as well as being used for paying salaries and bills.

The second scheme is the Internet Radio project in Sri Lanka. The Kothmale Community Radio (KCR) station is located in the central hill region of Sri Lanka and serves a population of about 200,000 people. In essence, the KCR producers trawl the internet for information related to that week’s headlines and translate the information and news into the local languages for daily broadcast. So, how does this bridge the digital divide for the people of Sri Lanka?

The answer lies in the fact that the majority of listeners live in remote parts of the country but have close family members working in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Dubai and elsewhere. With no access to a phone, very limited literacy and a poor postal service even for those who can read and write, members of such rural communities can through the radio project keep abreast of what’s happening in the countries where their relatives live and work. In addition, UNESCO also provided internet access points through the project as well as training in email use, word processing, spreadsheets and other software.

KCR is another first and another success story in narrowing the digital divide between the north and south. The material broadcast on KCR is tailored and is therefore of high relevance to these communities. Similar to the GrameenPhone project, it has kept the concept simple but by marrying the old technology of community radio with that of the internet, rural communities are experiencing and benefiting from connectivity. The KCR connected to the internet, serves as a link.

Finally, the One Laptop Per Child (Nigeria) project has become widely celebrated as a success in bridging the digital divide. Galadima Primary School was the first to receive 300 of these robust XO laptops, which cost just $100 each, and have low-cost satellite internet access via the VSAT system.

A teacher at the school is on record as explaining the benefits and this quote is testament to the impact enabling technology can have: “Before, we felt that we were not very important but now we have the laptop, we feel that we have moved ahead… Not only has it raised the status of the school, she said, but it has also improved learning at school and the surrounding community… The laptop has brought a greater impact to our children. It is easier to give notes and assignments and they learn faster,” the teacher said.

“All three projects based on simple concepts have led by example on how rural communities in the developing world can be digitally included,” says Mendis. “In looking to the future and to a more connected world, the hope is that the north and south will collaborate to bring digital equality for all, whilst also aiming for a safe and secure information society.”

Dinusha Mendis (2009). Bridging the digital divide: booming or doomed? A study of digital inclusion projects in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nigeria International Journal of Private Law, 2 (4), 371-384 DOI: 10.1504/IJPL.2009.024478

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• Developing world drives mobile surge (guardian.co.uk)
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On sibling site Sciencetext.com I talk tech, which often includes warning people about spams and scams and, of course phishing. So, it is with some embarrassment that I confess to being slightly caught off guard by a new twitter follower with the handle @richard_dawkins. He followed me first, a fact revealed by the excellent Topify service which emails you new followers and lets you reply to that email to follow them back.

It was the weekend, I was busily adding science twitter types to my scientwist list and without double checking added what turns out to be a fake Richard Dawkins to the list (now removed, of course). Actually, the tweets from the fake Dicky, look quite interesting but the bio points to a web page that is simply an Amazon associate frontpage selling his various books so that the fraudster makes a few pennies from each sale.

It was pharma consultant Sally Church (aka @MaverickNY) who planted the first seed of doubt, with the simple query: “Is that the real Dawkins or a fake/bot?” Joerg Heber and KEJames confirmed Sally’s suspicions. @ayasawada suggested the first few tweets were “too good to be true.” And, in response to my exposing the delusion, @dnotice asked simply, is he god?

Joerg even pointed to a discussion on the official Dawkins site that emphasises that he hadn’t even heard of Twitter until the first fake Dawkins crawled out from under a stone. He points out that even the @THE_REAL_DAWKINS is not the real Dawkins, although confesses he was taken in for a moment too. @mstuhmer pointed out that he’s actually a flying spaghetti monster, now I’m not sure whether he was referring to Dawkins or the fake Dawkins, or simply responding to the tweet by @dnotice.

Ironically, I’ve spoken to Dawkins once or twice and should have been more suspicious of a tweep claiming to be from him. In my defence, I did send a direct message (DM) to the faker with a query the answer to which only the good Professor would know (re a book we co-wrote many years ago). Needless, to say there has been no reply.

So, apologies to anyone on twitter who chose to follow the fake Dicky D after my mentioning him in a tweet.

If Twitter has plans to charge corporates and perhaps celebs for the privilege of using its services, then they are going to have to begin verifying users so that fakers cannot cybersquat twitter IDs. Or, am I being deluded in thinking that could be possible.

The difference between staying in with friends and going out? Obvious, really. But, translate that idea to networks and you have the basis of self-organized virtual communities, according to Panayotis Antoniadis of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris France.

Writing in the IJWBC (reference below), Antoniadis and Benedicte Le Grand discuss the bootstrapping problem of starting such a virtual community. I’ve discussed scientific virtual communities which relate to this previously. They suggest that it should be possible to kickstart a community by inheriting the social context and trust values from existing centralized web communities such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Allowing a community to self-organize rather than to create it using a single centrally managed web service and servers would have significant benefits, not least it would avoid reliance on a single organization or company. It would, of course, require members of the community to contribute different types of resources (e.g., bandwidth and storage), which is common to file-sharing systems known as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. “Unfortunately,” says Antoniadis, “such cooperation cannot be taken for granted.”

The team hopes to face this obstacle by introducing the notion of a “cross-layer incentive mechanism.” Such an approach would encourage users to contribute resources at a low-level to gain privileges or simple kudos at a higher social level within the community.

“We believe that this type of incentive mechanism will play a central role towards the realization of self-organised virtual communities and enable users to take advantage of the attractiveness and value of web-based communities, on the one hand, and the externalities and flexibility of P2P networks, on the other hand,” the researchers explain.

They are taking what they say are the first steps towards such a solution by developing a way to categorize the different types of social incentives and by providing insights for the design of the appropriate social software required to map member behaviour at the resource-sharing layer with suitable rewards at the social layer. Of course, some web 2.0 communities would say that kudos and trust-based communities already exist, but this approach abstracts it from the centralised model.

“The goal of the proposed system is not to grow to the level of the Internet but provide the means to small communities of people that trust each other to communicate in a privacy-preserving way, socialize and exchange resources,” Antoniadis told Sciencebase. “It is the digital analogue of ‘staying home with friends’ instead of ‘going out’,” he says. “Such communities could even be built on top of wireless user-owned networks without the need for the Internet at all, but on a much smaller scale and for different types of communication.”

Such wireless networks are known as “mesh” networks. Antoniadis and colleagues describe how a wireless mesh community might be built in a recent issue of IEEE Technology and Society.

Such a community would avoid the centralised nature of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ning by creating a network that shared out the necessary back-office tasks (storage, file sharing, newsfeed rendering, instant messaging (Skype is P2P in this sense already), and graphics distribution. This would make the community distributed rather than federalized so that it would no longer be reliant on a single organization or its servers. In one sense, you might say it would be like a small-scale internet.

Information about a new project with similar goals can be found here.

Panayotis Antoniadis, & Benedicte Le Grand (2009). Self-organised virtual communities: bridging the gap between web-based communities and P2P systems Int. J. Web Based Communities, 5 (2)