Feeling adventurous? Visit the ensemble genome browser. Really, it's safe for work. All you have to do is click the link.
If you dare.
Come on, you know you want to. Browse a bit ...
There. That wasn't so bad, was it?
One link away.
Now, if you're old enough, remember the world of 10 years ago. I know it's hard, but try.
Things have changed more than we know.
Anyone who thinks physicians are particularly immune to evil needs a quick history lesson. Or maybe they just need to be reminded that Al Qaeda's true leader, Zawahiri, is a surgeon. Or that Serbia's genocidal murderer, still at large, was a psychiatrist. And, of course, there's dear old Mengele.
So it would not be surprising if the principals in a recent set of terrorist attacks were physicians. Not surprising, but ominous.
The last few years the terrorist attacks and plots in the UK and US have, as nearly as I can tell (I try to track this) involved pretty incompetent people. No geeks. Nobody clever. Many persons with obvious psychiatric ailments or cognitive disorders.
This group is not like this. Maybe they were incompetent, or maybe we were just very lucky, but they're not naive or disabled. They more resemble the terrorists of Hamas than of the past few years of al Qaeda.
I'd very much like to know why they're getting smarter.
I was chatting with a colleague recently about the impact of robotics on infrastructure repair costs. Many older cities, most catastrophically New Orleans, have deferred infrastructure maintenance. In most cases this doesn't result in the annihilation of the city, but it does produce collapsing roadways in Montreal.
There's an upside to deferring infrastructure maintenance, assuming one is willing to risk a few motorists or, in the case of New Orleans, much of the city. The cost may shrink. Modern robotics is making a lot of everyday tasks, such as replacing gas mains, far cheaper. Roads are no longer torn up, instead robotic tunnelers wend their way beneath the asphalt.
Which makes me think about how the future arrives. Sometimes it arrives with great fanfare and long anticipation. Other times, though, it builds off to the side, sleepily and beneath our attention, and merges to take us unawares. I think robotics may be like that. They've been getting smarter and better in the deep ocean, on the battlefield, flying simulators with organic components, vacuuming, mowing ... Incrementally improving.
Japan is highly incented to lead in robotics. Korea is likely to take the same track. It seems inevitable that within 10-20 years most of us will own, and become dependent upon, many increasingly sophisticated robots. A future so long predicted that we've almost forgotten about it, will abruptly be upon us.
The implications for immigration, and for much of the work done by non-knowledge workers, will be substantial. (American knowledge workers, of course, are already doomed by globalization.)
I'm a dog person, but I'm kindly inclined to the Dog's historic rival in exploiting the human host. Not that Dogs and Cats are pure parasites, though the cat's role as a toxoplamsa vector arguably moves them closer to the dark side. Dogs do eat garbage and thus reduce disease (like toxoplasma, which can't live in dogs), cat's do kill pests, which reduces disease (do cats get plague?) and food loss.
Quibbles aside, as a happy host to my current canine parasite, I'll raise a toast to the strategic brilliance of the cat, an animal that went from chewing on primates to switching sides when the time was right ... (emphases mine)
The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication (Science)
... Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.
The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.
At least five females of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village. And from these five matriarchs all the world’s 600 million house cats are descended....
a subsequent NYT editorial comments:
Cats Among Us - New York Times
... This new genetic evidence resolves the puzzle of cat remains turning up in Cyprus before the rise of the Egyptian civilizations that were supposed to have domesticated the cat.
The wild subspecies that gave up their DNA for these tests still exist, though barely. That is one of the painful ironies of domestication. Creatures who come in from the wild eventually prosper — domestic cats number, after all, in the hundreds of millions — while those who don’t almost inevitably fall upon hard times...
Humans are the ultimate predator, compared to which the old saber tooths were ... pussy cats. We may not last long, but in the meantime we are pretty sure to wipe out every large animal that doesn't find a way to serve us. The cat made a good strategic move. With luck they might outlast us, and return to having primates for lunch long after we're gone ...
TheStar.com - Business - Richard Scrushy's road to prisonI'm sure there will be an appeal, but even so! The south is not what it was. An ex-governor and a wealthy evangelical con man both sent to prison for 7 years - without parole? What planet am I living on again?
Richard Scrushy, the rehabilitation king turned TV preacher, is trading his 92-foot yacht for a jailhouse bunk.
The former HealthSouth Corp. chief executive – cleared in a landmark corporate fraud trial in Birmingham but convicted on unrelated bribery charges in Montgomery – was sentenced late Thursday to nearly seven years in prison.
Scrushy's third wife, Leslie, a former HealthSouth secretary, cried as marshals took the millionaire with nine children into custody.
The term was imposed two years after Scrushy beat charges in Birmingham that he presided over a $2.6 billion (U.S.) accounting fraud at HealthSouth, a sweeping acquittal in sharp contrast to high-profile corporate convictions won against Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and Tyco International Ltd. executives.
After losing the case involving false earnings reports at the rehabilitation company Scrushy founded, federal prosecutors targeted his dealings in 1999 with then-Gov. Don Siegelman, who was also convicted and sentenced to seven years and four months in prison.
So Scrushy – the brash guy from small-town Alabama who mostly recently cast himself as a minister trying to save lost souls – is being sent far from his big boat, the Chez Soiree, and his estate in Birmingham, where HealthSouth is based.
A judge ordered him to serve six years and 10 months in federal prison, where there's no chance of parole. He must pay $417,000 in fines and restitution, serve three years on probation, and perform 500 hours of service work once freed.
It's a long fall for a man who once hobnobbed with celebrities and politicians. Asking the judge to spare him from prison, Scrushy, 54, portrayed himself as a humble man of God who did nothing wrong. "I'm just a pastor," he said.
Scrushy studied respiratory therapy before coming up with the idea in the early 1980s for a company focused on rehabilitation in outpatient clinics rather than hospitals.
Pooling money from investors, Scrushy launched what became HealthSouth, which billed itself as the nation's largest rehabilitation company with some 2,000 locations worldwide. Reported revenues exceeded $3.5 billion.
But something sinister was going on. Evidence at Scrushy's first trial showed a group of executives who called themselves "the family" began fudging earnings in a bid to bolster sagging stock prices. The company overstated earnings by $2.6 billion from 1996 through 2002.
Fifteen former executives pleaded guilty, and some said Scrushy directed the scam. But in a stunning defeat for the government, Scrushy was acquitted on 36 counts of fraud, false corporate reporting and making false statements to regulators.
Then came the bribery charges. Scrushy was accused of arranging $500,000 in payments for a seat on a board that regulates Alabama hospitals. He was convicted.
Scotsman.com News - UK - Second car bomb 'aimed at rescuers':
THE terrorists who attempted to bomb central London last week deliberately placed the second vehicle to catch rescuers attending the injured from the first explosion, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.
The senior security source also said the primitive gas and petrol devices were most likely the work of determined terrorists struggling - because of the security crackdown - to get their hands on the ingredients needed to create high explosives.
Yesterday, a huge police manhunt was under way for the terrorists responsible as forensic experts continued to examine the vehicles involved for clues.
The attack was thwarted after fumes were spotted leaking from the first vehicle, parked outside the packed Tiger Tiger nightclub in London's West End in the early hours of Friday morning...
Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally - New York TimesEthnicity reflects your cultural identity, so that word is clear enough. I think "ancestry" is too vague -- Japanese and Koreans may feel they have very different "ancestry" (and in a sense they do), but they're not two "races". I think we're stuck with race for now.
Another puzzle is presented by selected genes involved in brain function, which occur in different populations and could presumably be responses to behavioral challenges encountered since people left the ancestral homeland in Africa.
But some genes have more than one role, and some of these brain-related genes could have been selected for other properties.
Two years ago, Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, reported finding signatures of selection in two brain-related genes of a type known as microcephalins, because when mutated, people are born with very small brains. Two of the microcephalins had come under selection in Europeans and one in Chinese, Dr. Lahn reported.
He suggested that the selected forms of the gene had helped improved cognitive capacity and that many other genes, yet to be identified, would turn out to have done the same in these and other populations.
Neither microcephalin gene turned up in Dr. Pritchard’s or Dr. Williamson’s list of selected genes, and other researchers have disputed Dr. Lahn’s claims. Dr. Pritchard found that two other microcephalin genes were under selection, one in Africans and the other in Europeans and East Asians.
Even more strikingly, Dr. Williamson’s group reported that a version of a gene called DAB1 had become universal in Chinese but not in other populations. DAB1 is involved in organizing the layers of cells in the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions.
Variants of two genes involved in hearing have become universal, one in Chinese, the other in Europeans...
... A genomic survey of world populations by Dr. Feldman, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues in 2002 showed that people clustered genetically on the basis of small differences in DNA into five groups that correspond to the five continent-based populations: Africans, Australian aborigines, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians, a group that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent. The clusterings reflect “serial founder effects,” Dr. Feldman said, meaning that as people migrated around the world, each new population carried away just part of the genetic variation in the one it was derived from...
... The concept of race as having a biological basis is controversial, and most geneticists are reluctant to describe it that way. But some say the genetic clustering into continent-based groups does correspond roughly to the popular conception of racial groups....
... David Reich, a population geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, said that the term “race” was scientifically inexact and that he preferred “ancestry"...
Friedman, a celebrity whose reputation has cruelly fallen, writes about the implications of global reputations ...
The Whole World Is Watching - Friedman -New York Times
... When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer — and each of us so much more transparent.
The implications of all this are the subject of a new book by Dov Seidman, founder and C.E.O. of LRN, a business ethics company. His book is simply called “How.”..
Alas, Friedman is not much of a reader or a researcher, otherwise he'd know of David Brin's 1999 book, The Transparent Society. Friedman, presumably recycling Seidman, predicts youngsters of today will have to carefully manage their public actions from now through adulthood, avoiding any smirch on their record that would impair their future promotion path. So predictable. He doesn't even manage to mention that the vast majority of human history has been lived in small communities where reputations were as robust as memory.
If Friedman were to open his mind a wee bit, he'd take in a bit of science fiction. Reputation management has been a recurring theme of the genre for at least 20 years. There are many alternate paths, including identity obscuration (create false paths to confuse the story, an application of fraud techniques to blur recollection), identity fraud, and tools and methodologies to support the creation of multiple transient identities. In some paths one's "True Name" is guarded as closely as in LeGuin's fantasy novels, while alternate identities are juggled throughout life. Or, most likely of all, we'll only have to worry about any of this stuff for the short period of time in which our everyday environment is even marginally comprehensible to our feeble primate brains.
Incidentally, the relationship between John Gordon and me will become one degree more obscure sometime in the next few weeks....
Dyer 2007Some points of interest from this series:
June 14 The Islamic Republic of Gaza
June 18 Kosovo and the Law
June 21 China's Shoes
June 23 The Middle East After Iraq
