Monday, March 13, 2006
Defending Against Harmful Nanotech and Biotech
source:http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/03/13/139206.shtml
The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA
ADAPTATION The Yanomamo, left, and Ashkenazi Jews, center, may be examples of a society's genetic response to circumstances. Rice farming, practiced by East Asians for centuries, may have spurred evolutionary changes in physical and psychological traits
EAST ASIAN and European cultures have long been very different, Richard E. Nisbett argued in his recent book "The Geography of Thought." East Asians tend to be more interdependent than the individualists of the West, which he attributed to the social constraints and central control handed down as part of the rice-farming techniques Asians have practiced for thousands of years.
A separate explanation for such long-lasting character traits may be emerging from the human genome. Humans have continued to evolve throughout prehistory and perhaps to the present day, according to a new analysis of the genome reported last week by Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago. So human nature may have evolved as well.
If so, scientists and historians say, a fresh look at history may be in order. Evolutionary changes in the genome could help explain cultural traits that last over many generations as societies adapted to different local pressures.
Trying to explain cultural traits is, of course, a sensitive issue. The descriptions of national character common in the works of 19th-century historians were based on little more than prejudice. Together with unfounded notions of racial superiority they lent support to disastrous policies.
But like phrenology, a wrong idea that held a basic truth (the brain's functions are indeed localized), the concept of national character could turn out to be not entirely baseless, at least when applied to societies shaped by specific evolutionary pressures.
In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues found 700 regions of the genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times. In East Asians, the average date of these selection events is 6,600 years ago.
Many of the reshaped genes are involved in taste, smell or digestion, suggesting that East Asians experienced some wrenching change in diet. Since the genetic changes occurred around the time that rice farming took hold, they may mark people's adaptation to a historical event, the beginning of the Neolithic revolution as societies switched from wild to cultivated foods.
Some of the genes are active in the brain and, although their role is not known, may have affected behavior. So perhaps the brain gene changes seen by Dr. Pritchard in East Asians have some connection with the psychological traits described by Dr. Nisbett.
Some geneticists believe the variations they are seeing in the human genome are so recent that they may help explain historical processes. "Since it looks like there has been significant evolutionary change over historical time, we're going to have to rewrite every history book ever written," said Gregory Cochran, a population geneticist at the University of Utah. "The distribution of genes influencing relevant psychological traits must have been different in Rome than it is today," he added. "The past is not just another country but an entirely different kind of people."
John McNeill, a historian at Georgetown University, said that "it should be no surprise to anyone that human nature is not a constant" and that selective pressures have probably been stronger in the last 10,000 years than at any other epoch in human evolution. Genetic information could therefore have a lot to contribute, although only a minority of historians might make use of it, he said.
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has distinguished between high-trust and low-trust societies, arguing that trust is a basis for prosperity. Since his 1995 book on the subject, researchers have found that oxytocin, a chemical active in the brain, increases the level of trust, at least in psychological experiments. Oxytocin levels are known to be under genetic control in other mammals like voles.
It is easy to imagine that in societies where trust pays off, generation after generation, the more trusting individuals would have more progeny and the oxytocin-promoting genes would become more common in the population. If conditions should then change, and the society be engulfed by strife and civil warfare for generations, oxytocin levels might fall as the paranoid produced more progeny.
Napoleon Chagnon for many decades studied the Yanomamo, a warlike people who live in the forests of Brazil and Venezuela. He found that men who had killed in battle had three times as many children as those who had not. Since personality is heritable, this would be a mechanism for Yanomamo nature to evolve and become fiercer than usual.
Since the agricultural revolution, humans have to a large extent created their own environment. But that does not mean the genome has ceased to evolve. The genome can respond to cultural practices as well as to any other kind of change. Northern Europeans, for instance, are known to have responded genetically to the drinking of cow's milk, a practice that began in the Funnel Beaker Culture which thrived 6,000 to 5,000 years ago. They developed lactose tolerance, the unusual ability to digest lactose in adulthood. The gene, which shows up in Dr. Pritchard's test, is almost universal among people of Holland and Sweden who live in the region of the former Funnel Beaker culture.
The most recent example of a society's possible genetic response to its circumstances is one advanced by Dr. Cochran and Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. In an article last year they argued that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases found among Ashkenazi Jews (those of Central and Eastern Europe) was a response to the demands for increased intelligence imposed when Jews were largely confined to the intellectually demanding professions of money lending and tax farming. Though this period lasted only from 900 A.D. to about 1700, it was long enough, the two scientists argue, for natural selection to favor any variant gene that enhanced cognitive ability.
One theme in their argument is that the variant genes perform related roles, which is unlikely to happen by chance since mutations hit the genome randomly. A set of related mutations is often the mark of an evolutionary quick fix against some sudden threat, like malaria. But the variant genes common among the Ashkenazi do not protect against any known disease. In the Cochran and Harpending thesis, the genes were a response to the demanding social niche into which Ashkenazi Jews were forced and the nimbleness required to be useful to their unpredictable hosts.
No one has yet tested the Cochran-Harpending thesis, which remains just an interesting though well worked out conjecture. But one of its predictions is that the same genes should be targets of selection in any other population where there is a demand for greater cognitive skills. That demand might have well have arisen among the first settled societies where people had to deal with the quite novel concepts of surpluses, property, value and quantification. And indeed Dr. Pritchard's team detected strong selection among East Asians in the region of the gene that causes Gaucher's disease, one of the variant genes common among Ashkenazim.
source:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/weekinreview/12wade.html?ex=1299819600&en=4ffa8520bf6f7229&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Laotian Rodent Proves Living Fossil
Paleontologist Mary Dawson of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and her team immediately recognized the strange rodent as a living member of a family thought to have been extinct for at least 11 million years: the Diatomyidae. Fossilized remnants of this group have been found throughout Asia with a distinctive jaw structure and molars. A new specimen of Diatomys discovered in June of last year in China bore an uncanny resemblance "It's the coelacanth of rodents," Dawson says, referring to the ancient fish believed extinct until a live specimen was hauled from the depths by South African fishermen. "One of the beautiful parts of this discovery was that we were able to correctly predict that Laonastes would have four roots in its molars just as in Diatomys." The rock rat represents a rare opportunity to compare assumptions derived from the fossil record and an actual living specimen to determine overall accuracy of the techniques involved, the scientists argue. It also represents tantalizing support for the theory that many mammals evolved in Asia and later colonized other continents, as its closest living relative is the gundis--a guinea pig-like rodent of northern Africa.Ultimately, kha-nyou provides a compelling argument for preservation efforts in Southeast Asia, joining tree shrews, flying lemurs and tarsiers as remnant populations of ancient mammal families in the region. "Laonastes is not the only new organism to be discovered in southeastern Asia," Dawson adds. "The highest priority must be given to preserving this unique biota and especially Laonastes while it is still possible." --David Biello source:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0004626C-B176-1410-B17683414B7F0000&ref=rss |
Mozilla's Millions?
Mozilla's Web browser applications have been downloaded over a hundred million times for free. But that doesn't mean the spawn of AOL isn't turning a profit.
Thanks to Google, Mozilla is raking in millions of dollars of revenue, which is used to pay the employees of the recently formed Mozilla Corporation and fund project and infrastructure development.
Google, which makes its share of philanthropic and open source donations, also directly employs a few Firefox developers, including lead developer Ben Goodger.
Google isn't just paying Mozilla "millions" out of the kindness of its heart. It's more so based on the same basic principle which it pays other partners and affiliates, namely search.
The default start page for Firefox includes a Google search dialogue box. It also defaults to Google search in its engine option on the Search Bar within the browser navigational toolbar. Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.
That Google pays content and search partners, as well as AdSense participants, is not new. What is interesting, however, is the amount that Mozilla earns from its users' Google queries.
"We are very fortunate in that the search feature in Firefox is both appreciated by our users and generates revenue in the tens of millions of dollars," Mozilla head Mitchell Baker wrote in a recent blog post.
One blogger has speculated that the figure is as high as $72 million in fact.
Mozilla Corporation board member Chris Blizzard said that the $72 million figure is not correct, "though not off by an order of magnitude."
The Mozilla Corporation uses the fund to pay its employees which currently number 40 full-time equivalents (FTE) according to Baker. Most of those FTE's reside in either Mountain View, Calif., or in and around Toronto, Canada.
Browsers have not historically really been a money-making standalone business.
Mozilla's predecessor, Netscape, was also available for free and did not have the benefit (at the time) of a paying search partnership. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is a "free" inclusion for its Windows users and is not sold as a standalone product.
It's unclear whether Mozilla has another revenue-generating option from within the browser itself.
"People sometimes ask if there are other features from which we could make money. The short answer is: We don't know," Baker wrote. "Perhaps search is the only feature that will both benefit users and generate this kind of revenue."
source:http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3590756
Bird flu: IT pros planning for worst
The department sits across the street from the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where a high number of infected patients could be treated and where a large percentage of the staff travel widely as part of their jobs, increasing the likelihood they could come back infected.
"Our biggest fear is that we won't be able to get back to our data center for an extended amount of time, so we set up systems that would make it accessible remotely," says Ross McKenzie, IS director for the school of public health.
The school has addressed remote control capabilities for PCs and servers by buying 550 GoToMyPC licenses that let network administrators log on via Web-based clients. "Every IT function, except maybe the physical help desk, can be performed remotely at this point," McKenzie says.
Unfortunately, industry experts speculate that, unlike the Bloomberg School, many IS departments are not planning far enough ahead for an outbreak of the avian flu.
Of 167 government workers across eight federal departments, 44% don't know how they should react to a flu emergency, according to a poll by Telework Exchange, an online forum trying to quantify how much teleworking goes on in the federal government.
A survey last month of 300 Minnesota business officials found most thought a flu pandemic would significantly affect their businesses, but only 18% had preparedness plans in place. The poll, sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, found that close to two-thirds of respondents said they were prepared or somewhat prepared to move employees to remote locations or let them work at home, while 29% said they were not prepared.
The H5N1 influenza virus, which originated in Asia, could hit the United States this fall, potentially causing an epidemic, the nation's chief avian flu coordinator warned last week. It can be transmitted from birds to humans via close contact, but not from human to human - yet.
Flu experts say mutations are almost certain to create a strain that supports human-to-human transmission. The resultant pandemic will make between 75 million and 90 million people sick in the United States, with as many as 2 million deaths, according to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office.
Some businesses, such as White Electronic Designs in Phoenix, have the basics of plans in place. "We've given consideration to the avian flu situation as part of our enterprise risk management program," says Jim Kritcher, vice president of corporate IT for the firm.
He says plans call for asking workers returning from areas where flu has struck to work from home for a period to avoid infecting others at corporate sites. And the company would conduct as much work as possible remotely. "We would certainly be susceptible, especially since we have employees traveling to Asia on a regular basis. We do a significant amount of manufacturing in China," he says.
For many companies, VPNs are the mainstay for their disaster plans. "It's the lynchpin of our remote access," says Paul Beaudry, director of technical services for JRI, the largest agribusiness company in Canada, based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
The company has dual Aventail SSL VPN gateways installed at its headquarters that support 800 employees for accessing e-mail and about 25 work-at-home employees. In the event of flu, that number would rise significantly, and the company would buy more VPN licenses and turn up more applications.
The IT staff of 15 has been trained to increase the number of applications available through the gateway and to increase the resources employees are authorized to reach over the VPN, Beaudry says. So even if some of the IT staff is out of work, someone will be able to set up the VPN for those able to work from home.
| Inoculate your business The threat of an avian flu epidemic preventing large numbers of employees from coming to work means corporate IT departments need to figure out now how they will keep workers connected. Some tips: | ||||||||||||
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Similarly, Kritcher says White Electronic Designs will use its Cisco VPN concentrators to support remote access as well as thin clients to access applications remotely.
The concentrators can scale to handle extra concurrent users, he says, but during an emergency, the number of people trying to connect via the VPN could strain WAN connections and result in slow response time or failure to connect. "So we are testing procedures to reconfigure the WAN links such as wireless IP currently used for failover and redeploy them to support additional VPN traffic," Kritcher says.
In the case of the Johns Hopkins health school, VPNs were too expensive, McKenzie says. "We didn't want something that could be open to everyone when we weren't entirely sure, considering the situation, who or how many would need to use it," he says.
Such planning is essential, according to Gartner, which has published a report titled "Prepare Now for a Coming Avian Influenza Pandemic."
He recommends preparing lists of the most important knowledge workers on staff and figuring out how they can work from home for extended periods. In addition to network access, they'll need the ability to conference with co-workers, customers and business partners, McGee says.
Still, there is only so much IT executives can do, Beaudry notes. "You've got a human fear factor, and you may have people reacting in a way you couldn't predict," he says. "You may have a quarantine situation and business can be impacted - there's no question. But you have to keep the business running."
source:http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/031306-avian-flu-it-plans.html?netht=031006netflash
Police blotter: Ex-employee faces suit over file deletion
"Police blotter" is a weekly report on the intersection of technology and the law.
What: International Airport Centers sues former employee, claiming use of a secure file deletion utility violated federal hacking laws.
When: Decided March 8 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
Outcome: Federal hacking law applies, the court said in a 3-0 opinion written by Judge Richard Posner.
What happened, according to the court: Jacob Citrin was once employed by International Airport Centers and given a laptop to use in his company's real estate related business. The work consisted of identifying "potential acquisition targets."
At some point, Citrin quit IAC and decided to continue in the same business for himself, a choice that IAC claims violated his employment contract.
Normally that would have been a routine business dispute. But the twist came when Citrin dutifully returned his work laptop--and IAC tried to undelete files on it to prove he did something wrong.
IAC couldn't. It turned out that (again according to IAC) Citrin had used a "secure delete" program to make sure that the files were not just deleted, but overwritten and unrecoverable.
In most operating systems, of course, when a file is deleted only the reference to it in the directory structure disappears. The data remains on the hard drive.
But a wealth of programs like PGP, open-source programs such as Wipe, and a built-in feature in Apple Computer's OS X called Secure Empty Trash will make sure the information has truly vanished.
Inevitably, perhaps, IAC sued. The relevance for Police Blotter readers is that the company claimed that Citrin's alleged secure deletion violated a federal computer crime law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
That law says whoever "knowingly causes damage without authorization" to a networked computer can be held civilly and criminally liable.
The 7th Circuit made two remarkable leaps. First, the judges said that deleting files from a laptop counts as "damage." Second, they ruled that Citrin's implicit "authorization" evaporated when he (again, allegedly) chose to go into business for himself and violate his employment contract.
The implications of this decision are broad. It effectively says that employees better not use OS X's Secure Empty Trash feature, or any similar utility, because they could face civil and criminal charges after they leave their job. (During oral argument last October, one judge wondered aloud: "Destroying a person's data--that's as bad as you can do to a computer.")
Citrin pointed out that his employment contract permitted him to "destroy" data in the laptop when he left the company. But the 7th Circuit didn't buy it, and reinstated the suit against him brought by IAC.
Excerpts from Posner's opinion (click here for PDF), with parentheses in the original: The provision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on which IAC relies provides that whoever "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer (a defined term that includes the laptop that Citrin used)," violates the Act. Citrin argues that merely erasing a file from a computer is not a "transmission." Pressing a delete or erase key in fact transmits a command, but it might be stretching the statute too far (especially since it provides criminal as well as civil sanctions for its violation) to consider any typing on a computer keyboard to be a form of "transmission" just because it transmits a command to the computer...
Citrin's breach of his duty of loyalty terminated his agency relationship (more precisely, terminated any rights he might have claimed as IAC's agent--he could not by unilaterally terminating any duties he owed his principal gain an advantage!) and with it his authority to access the laptop, because the only basis of his authority had been that relationship...
Citrin points out that his employment contract authorized him to "return or destroy" data in the laptop when he ceased being employed by IAC (emphasis added). But it is unlikely, to say the least, that the provision was intended to authorize him to destroy data that he knew the company had no duplicates of and would have wanted to have--if only to nail Citrin for misconduct. The purpose of the provision may have been to avoid overloading the company with returned data of no further value, which the employee should simply have deleted.
More likely the purpose was simply to remind Citrin that he was not to disseminate confidential data after he left the company's employ--the provision authorizing him to return or destroy data in the laptop was limited to "Confidential" information. There may be a dispute over whether the incriminating files that Citrin destroyed contained "confidential" data, but that issue cannot be resolved on this appeal. The judgment is reversed with directions to reinstate the suit, including the supplemental claims that the judge dismissed because he was dismissing IAC's federal claim.
source:http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6048449.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed
NASA Mars explorer nears critical approach to Red Planet's orbit
After a seven-month voyage, the orbiter was scheduled to fire its rockets at around 2124 GMT Friday to slow the 2.2-tonne vehicle to 14,000 kilometers (8,700 miles) per hour, permitting it to be grabbed by Mars's gravitational pull.
"We have been preparing for years for the critical events the spacecraft must execute on Friday," said Jim Graf, project manager for the orbiter at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
"By all indications, we're in great shape to succeed, but Mars has taught us never to get overconfident. Two of the last four orbiters NASA sent to Mars did not survive final approach," he told reporters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "Mars is unpredictable."
The MRO mission, "the most technologically advanced payload we have ever sent to another planet," is fraught with risks because of the difficulty of settling a craft into orbit after the lengthy journey.
The tricky part, Graf said, will be maneuvering the craft into a Mars orbit. Because of the great distance, it takes 12 minutes for data to reach Earth from the craft, and another 12 minutes for instructions to be sent back.
So the deceleration is handled automatically by instructions programmed into the craft.
"We are about 325,000 miles (523,036 kilometers) from Mars. We're traveling at about 6,400 miles (10,300 kilometers) an hour, and we are going to double our speed as we get closer to Mars," Graf said.
"There is no time for the team as a whole to react, ... so we have on board all the programs we need to carry out, and the spacecraft has to do it all on its own."
To achieve Mars orbit, the probe's engines will begin firing at 2124 GMT on Friday for 27 minutes.
"For the last six minutes, we are essentially in white-knuckle time, wondering if we're going to actually complete the burn and go into orbit," said Graf.
About 20 minutes later, the orbiter will disappear behind Mars for 30 minutes before it renews contact with very anxious scientists on Earth.
At first, the probe will be in a highly elliptical orbit 400 kilometers (250 miles) from Mars at the closest point and 44,000 kilometers (27,340 miles) at its apogee, or farthest point.
In late March, NASA engineers will start operations to bring the probe to a lower and rounder orbit to begin the 25-month observation mission.
"Our primary science phase won't begin until November, but we'll actually be studying the changeable structure of Mars's atmosphere by sensing the density of the atmosphere at different altitudes each time we fly through it during aerobraking," said JPL's Richard Zurek, project scientist for the mission.
The MRO carries six observation and analysis instruments to search for signs of water and ice from the planet's outer atmosphere to below the Martian surface.
When its 25-month research mission is over, MRO will serve as a high-speed communications relay satellite until 2011 for at least two future Mars landers.
The MRO will join two American orbiters, the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, and one European orbiter, Mars Express, that are already looking for signs of water and ice on the Red Planet.
NASA also has two robotic rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on the surface of Mars.
source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060310/ts_alt_afp/usspacemars
Blizzard CEO Responds to GLBT Issue
Drawing last month's GLBT-friendly guild story to what looks to be its close, Blizzard CEO Paul Sams has responded to Lambda Legal, the gay and lesbian civil rights group which then contacted the company citing anti-discrimination case law in opposition to Blizzard's decision.
In it he again characterized the earlier decision to prohibit mention of 'real-world' subjects in recruiting for guilds as an "unfortunate mistake," which only came about because the initial comments weren't properly analyzed before sending a warning.
"It is expected and accepted that players will discuss a wide variety of topics, based on both the game world and the real world," Sams says. "Players are free to discuss personal characteristics if they wish, to include their sexual orientations and gender identities."
"Blizzard has provided additional training to its game masters," the letter continues, "in order to give them a greater level of sensitivity when responding to similar situations in the future. Blizzard has specifically instructed its game masters that mentioning or discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in a non-insulting fashion is not a violation of the anti-harassment policy and does not constitute grounds for a warning or any other disciplinary action."
In addition to the training, a separate guild recruitment chat channel went into effect in an early February patch, to both allow like-minded players to advertise for groups, and appease those players that might not wish to listen.
"It has always been and will remain Blizzard’s policy," Sams concludes, "that LGBT-friendly guilds are allowed to announce their existence, and to recruit members in the same manner as any other guilds."
source:http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2006/03/blizzard_ceo_re.php
