UK university lecture podcasts – tears to my eyes

This kind of stuff brings tears to my eyes.

No, really.

Aaronson’s MIT lectures on theoretical computer science, MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenAccess journals, Apple’s iTunes U, the BBC’s In Our Time – all beautiful contradictions to recent history.

Today that illustrious group is joined by several illustrious UK institutions …

BBC NEWS | UK | Education | UK university lectures on iTunes

University College London, the Open University and Trinity College Dublin are putting lectures onto iTunes.

Educational content is already available in the United States through the non-charging "iTunes U" section of the music downloading service.

But European universities are now joining, providing video and audio material for students to use on iPods or computers.

The service will include recordings of lectures from leading academics…

… The initial offerings from UCL will include material about neuroscience, the university's "lunch time lectures" and an audio news round-up.

The Open University is promising to make available 300 audio and video files with material from current courses.

Trinity College Dublin is promising lectures from journalist Seymour Hersh, scientist Robert Winston, author Anita Desai and politician Alex Salmond.

This will be available from iTunes U, launched by Apple computers last summer as a free education area within the iTunes online music and video store.

It is intended to make lectures available to students at the institutions and to a wider public audience.

This has been used by leading US universities to provide lectures and research news, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT.

Many universities in the UK have been making their own podcasts of lectures, but this will be the first time they have been distributed on the iconic iTunes service.

Open University vice-chancellor Brenda Gourley said it was an exciting new opportunity for anyone, anywhere in the world to gain easy access to its courses.

"Our aim is to partner our established distance learning expertise with the power of the internet to provide as mobile, flexible and personalised learning as possible, whatever your current educational level, personal circumstances or technological abilities."…

One hundred years ago we thought radio would bring expertise to anyone able to listen, and, thanks in large part to the BBC, it had some success. Fifty years ago people thought television would contribute, but the twin barriers of time, reach, and limited bandwidth were too high for real progress. Twenty-five years ago Bill Gates father (William Henry Gates - "CD-ROM: The New Papyrus") and I thought the CD-ROM would do this, and it might have but for the net.

Now it’s happening, and almost nobody notices.

Sniffle.

[1] See also: The quiet demise of the CD

Amazon is down?!

Other sites are online, but Google is slow and Amazon is …

http://www.amazon.com/

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

It’s probably a local router issue, but weird.

Update 6/6/08: Yes, it was down. Not a DOS attack though, probably human error.

Gourmet magazine: world's most successful spammer?

There are three classes of true spam, by which I mean spam for which unsubscribe requests don't work.

There's fraudulent spam with fake email addresses. That's 95% and it's hard to stop.

There's political spam with valid, albeit fungible, email addresses. It's legal. Congress always exempts itself from its own laws.

And then there's Gourmet Magazine and Conde Nast. Valid email addresses, but unsubscribe doesn't work. They're breaking the law, but the spam keeps coming ...

Nast and Spam: what's the deal here?

... It's easy to eliminate -- I just block 'condenastpubs.com'. Still, it's weird. I suspect a good portion of the middle class doesn't mind getting spam from Gourmet ...

Update 10/14/07: Judging from a helpful comment, this appears to be a business decision by Conde Nast, not a technical error or a fluke. I think there's a strong case to be made for blacklisting the condenast.com domain.

Update 1/18/07: I got another Gourmet magazine spam -- but the domain was erol.com. Turns out this is not a Gourmet spam after all; it's a phishing email. I suspect even Conde Nast hasn't fallen that far. It's a measure of how low they have fallen, however, that phishers are now riding their spammy coattails."

Today they started using gourmetmagazine.com. I noticed because I had to add that to my 'delete on receipt filter'. (Note to Gourmet, if you want to comment email won't work, your domain filters to the trash.)

So how and why does a theoretically legit enterprise become a unique category of spammer?

It must be working for them. There's evidently something vulnerable about a significant number of people who subscribe to Gourmet magazine (cough, not you Emily). They must be somewhat lonely or bored, and they must be uniquely easy to sell to. Gourmet probably makes a good bit of change selling these email addresses to crooks.

If I were an IRS agent with time on my hands, I'd be auditing Conde Nast. A company that does this sort of thing probably has other shady practices. You may know them by their deeds ...

Update 7/31/08: Phishers are leveraging Conde Nast's penchant for spam and various email addresses, today a phisher used condemailings.com". If you hand out in the swamps, you tend to attract alligators ...

Google transit - slowly growing, now to add bike routes

The Twin Cities has many great things, but transit hasn't been among them since we lost our trams in the 30s.

The good news is we're extending our light rail system, and gas prices are being very helpful.

Still, it's no surprise Google Transit hasn't gotten to our area yet. On the other hand, they've done Montreal:

Beaconsfield, QC, Canada to Lucien-L'Allier, Canada - Google Maps

The integration is very elegant -- you see pt-to-pt route by multiple modalities. The mobile version has transit as well.

It would be nice if they were to add bicycle routes as well.

Ok, it would be extremely nice. Minneapolis has the best bicycle transit system of any snowy city in North America, and is probably #2 or #3 by any criteria. It would be wonderful to see that appear in our Google transit maps.

I think I heard gas break $4/gallon today ...

Update 6/5/08: Per comments, we'll be getting coverage in the TC's this summer! Yay! No bike routes yet, but that's gotta come soon. I suspect Google people like bikes ...

Britannica finally goes social

I've been a Britannica Online subscriber since they launched -- mostly out of sentiment. I really don't use them very often -- even though I set Google up so Britannica is searched with every Google query.

Years ago I hoped they might find common cause with the New York Times and build a joint community. Heck, I'd have been happy if they simply built their own community.

They never did, and eventually I figured they'd lost their way for good. I mostly forgot about the EB, even though I still subscribed. Recently, though, I began reading the Britannica blog. It's pretty good. A sign of life!

Today there were two blogs on Britannica's long delayed social reinvention. It sounds like they'll try to merge a Wikipedia like community with the core formal encyclopedia

• Britannica's New Site: More Participation, Collaboration from Experts and Readers
• Collaboration and the voice of experts

I hope it works, I'm just glad to see there's some energy left in the place.

Evolution in action - captured and dissected

A 20 year longitudinal study of bacterial evolution is further constraint on the argument facades creationists use to conceal their faith-based opinions. Emphasis mine, arguably this research evolved a new species of bacteria ...

The Loom : A New Step In Evolution (yes, Carl Zimmer again)

... After 33,127 generations Lenski and his students noticed something strange in one of the colonies. The flask started to turn cloudy. This happens sometimes when contaminating bacteria slip into a flask and start feeding on a compound in the broth known as citrate...

...Many species of bacteria can eat citrate, but in an oxygen-rich environment like Lenski's lab, E. coli can't. The problem is that the bacteria can't pull the molecule in through their membranes. In fact, their failure has long been one of the defining hallmarks of E. coli as a species.

...In nature, there have been a few reports of E. coli that can feed on citrate. But these oddballs all acquired a ring of DNA called a plasmid from some other species of bacteria. Lenski selected a strain of E. coli for his experiments that doesn't have any plasmids, there were no other bacteria in the experiment, and the evolved bacteria remain plasmid-free. So the only explanation was that this one line of E. coli had evolved the ability to eat citrate on its own.

Blount ...went back through the ancestral stocks to see if they included any citrate-eaters.... in generation 31,500, they made up 0.5% of the population. Their population rose to 19% in the next 1000 generations, but then they nearly vanished at generation 33,000. But in the next 120 generations or so, the citrate-eaters went berserk, coming to dominate the population.

This rise and fall and rise suggests that the evolution of citrate-eating was not a one-mutation affair. The first mutation (or mutations) allowed the bacteria to eat citrate, but they were outcompeted by some glucose-eating mutants that still had the upper hand. Only after they mutated further did their citrate-eating become a recipe for success.

... Lenski's research has shown that in many ways, evolution is repeatable. The 12 lines tend to evolve in the same direction... Often these parallel changes are the result of changes to the same genes. And yet when it comes to citrate-eating, evolution seems to have produced a fluke.

To gauge the flukiness of the citrate-eaters, Blount and Lenski replayed evolution. They grew new populations from 12 time points in the 33,000-generations of pre-citrate-eating bacteria. They let the bacteria evolve for thousands of generations, monitoring them for any signs of citrate-eating. They then transferred the bacteria to Petri dishes with nothing but citrate to eat. All told, they tested 40 trillion cells...

... Out of that staggering hoard of bacteria, only a handful of citrate-eating mutants arose. None of the original ancestors or early predecessors gave rise to citrate-eaters; only later stages in the line could--mostly from 27,000 generations or beyond. Still, even among these later E. coli, the odds of evolving into a citrate-eater was staggeringly low, on the order of one-in-a-trillion...

If E. coli is defined as a species that can't eat citrate, does that mean that Lenski's team has witnessed the origin of a new species? The question is actually murkier than it seems, because the traditional concept of species doesn't fit bacteria very comfortably. (For the details, check out my new article on Scientific American, "What is a Species?")...

There's a tangent here Zimmer didn't call out.

The researchers were able to replicate the speciation-vent, but it took trillions of tries from the relatively late stage precursors of the citrate eaters. It might take hundreds or thousands of trillions of "tries" to get the same outcome from wild E. Coli. Of course that's only a few hundred years of bacterial evolution.

If they repeated the same experiments fifty times, they'd probably get other one-in-a-hundred-trillion flukes over a 20 year trial, but they'd likely be different flukes.

Flip a coin a thousand times and there's a 100% probability you'll get a sequence made up of Heads and Tails. The chance that the next thousand flips will get the same sequence is very, very low.

Naive old-style creationists got hung up on the impossibly small probability that evolution, replayed from the start, would produce us.

Well, ummn, no, it wouldn't.

The more interesting question is, if you replayed evolution on earth 1000 times, how many times would you produce something that would do experiments about evolution on earth?

That's a Drake equation question. The "expert" wild guesses are in the 20% to 0.33% range, but we could do with a few data points ...

Aging is a very old strategy -- proteins in the cap

I almost missed this astounding Boston Globe article. Mercifully I track Zimmer's blog, so I'm only 48 hours behind.

Note the explanation of why evolution has not produced immortal species (it sucks resources from adaptive capacity), and the analogy between bacterial "caps" and human eggs (emphases mine) ...

Aging is older than you think - The Boston Globe Carl Zimmer

... why hasn't evolution favored perfect repair - in other words, immortality?

"Immortality is not cost-effective," says Stewart.

To never get old, organisms would have to invest a huge amount of energy in repair. They'd be left with little energy to reproduce. Natural selection would instead favor other organisms that put less energy into repair and produced more offspring.

A common solution to this trade-off is to set aside a special population of cells that will reproduce. Our bodies put a great deal of energy into keeping eggs and sperm from becoming damaged. They put much less care into repairing the rest of our cells.

"My children are born young and rejuvenated. So the damage of my aging is kept just to me," says Stewart.

Many scientists assumed that symmetrically dividing microbes could not take advantage of the aging strategy we use. "Every problem that would arise, the cell would have to fix," says Stewart...

... Stewart and his colleagues have revealed that even symmetrically dividing bacteria get old.

They put a single E. coli on a slide and allowed it to reproduce. They engineered it to produce a glow, which made it and its descendants easier to film. Using sophisticated image-processing software, they were able to track 35,000 cells, observing how long each one took to divide.

In 2005, Stewart and his colleagues reported that some bacteria began to reproduce more slowly than their cousins, and over the generations their descendants slowed down even more.

There was one crucial difference between the old and young microbes: the caps at each end of their rod-shaped bodies. Each time E. coli divides, the two new microbes each inherit one of its caps, and the microbe must manufacture a new cap for each one. When these two microbes divide again, they each make two new caps. Over the generations, there will be some bacteria that inherit the original caps from the common ancestor of the entire colony, while others have younger caps. After a cap ages for 100 generations, the scientists estimate, the cell can no longer reproduce.

The scientists then took a closer look at what was happening inside the bacteria. Earlier this year, they reported that clumps of tangled proteins grow in E. coli. As the bacteria divide, these clumps end up in the old caps. Somehow, the defective proteins help slow down the growth of old bacteria.

Stewart sees these results as evidence that single-celled bacteria use the same strategy multicellular animals do to cope with cell damage.

"It's probably cheaper to throw away your garbage in one cell while the rest of your population grows."

Daniel Promislow, an expert on the genetics of aging at the University of Georgia, finds the research exciting. For one thing, it suggests that the common ancestor of bacteria and animals was already aging 3 billion years ago.

"Aging would be a really old phenomenon," he says.

Studying aging in quick-breeding E. coli could allow scientists to get answers about the process faster than with other lab animals, like flies or mice, Promislow says. "There's a lot you can do in a short amount of time."

It might even be possible to translate some of those lessons to medical applications. Alzheimer's disease, for example, is associated with clumps of proteins called plaques that form in neurons.

"It may be possible to find a way to alleviate protein damage in E. coli that would have a use in higher organisms," says Stewart. "I'm not saying it's going to be easy to find, though.

To the non-expert this certainly has the smell of "breakthrough". Changing the evolutionary address of aging is a big deal, and developing a new "instrument" to study aging is an equally big advance.

It feels astounding to me, but I'm easily excitable.

PS. While Death sacrifices the individual to power adaptation, Sex sacrifices offspring to power adapatation. Sex is an even more radical gambit than Death, so it's not surprising that while Death is universal, Sex can be sacrificed even in multicellular organisms.

Buying Obama bumper stickers

Oddly, there's nothing on the front page of the official site about buying campaign paraphernalia. I had to go to the answers database and search ...

Answer Center Barack Obama

You can buy buttons, t-shirts, bumper stickers, lapel pins, and party packs here.

...yard signs will be available at the store.barackobama.com this summer...

Someone needs to put this stuff on page one.

The melamine is still coming from China ...

The report of this successful intercept was published on Dec 26, 2007:

FDA Says It Halted Melamine-Tainted Pet Treats

...Sampling by the FDA’s Los Angeles District showed that pet treats imported from China, including treat seed sticks for cockatiels and honey cakes for hamsters tested positive for melamine, according to a government report...

You gotta love those Google alerts -- a small release in a bird focused pet site shows up on my news page as though it were on the front page of the NYT.

This is not good news. Yes, it's nice to know the FDA is catching some melamine contaminated imports, but that's a bit like reading about the DEA making a big cocaine haul.

It just tells us that the supply lines are still running.

The one bright spot is that if the Dems hold the Senate and Obama takes the Presidency, then there's hope for a resurrected FDA and policies that hold importers liable for product defects. The FDA only has to hold on until then ...

Of course if McCain wins ...

Anti-science and global warming - the GOP's corporate rule

The Bushies understood six years ago that the best available science predicted rising CO2 emissions would lead to global warming and disruptive local climate transformations

They must have understood this, or they wouldn't have made strenuous efforts to hide the science ..

Editorial - The Science of Denial on Global Warming - Editorial - NYTimes.com:

... An internal investigation by NASA’s inspector general concluded that political appointees in the agency’s public affairs office had tried to restrict reporters’ access to its leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen. He has warned about climate change for 20 years and has openly criticized the administration’s refusal to tackle the issue head-on.

More broadly, the investigation said that politics played a heavy role in the office and that it had presented information about global warming “in a manner that reduced, marginalized or mischaracterized climate-change science made available to the general public.”...

... What was most noteworthy about the latter report was that it made it to the light of day. A 1990 law requires the president to give Congress every four years its best assessment of the likely effects of climate change. The last such assessment was undertaken by President Clinton and published in 2000. Mr. Bush not only missed the 2004 deadline but allowed the entire information-gathering process to wither. Only a court order handed down last August in response to a lawsuit by public interest groups forced him to deliver this month.

I do find it hard to write about this stuff. If we don't read, and write, however, we're surrendering. We don't deserve the option of surrender.

It's always the same story with the Bush GOP. They aren't rationalists. They believe what they want to believe. They silence opposing voices. They ignore laws they don't like. They know they'll get away.

If the Dems didn't hold the Senate by one vote (Senator Leiberman, basically) the Bush GOP would have gotten away with everything.

One lousy vote.

So where is this type of behavior normal? In corporations. Corporations are not democracies (shock!), they are more like feudal nations. Corporations have an obligation to obey the laws (ok, unlike the GOP), but they don't have an obligation to objective truth. If you work for Exxon, you have no right to complain if Exxon refuses to publish your Exxon-funded research on global warming. There's nothing wrong with that -- that's the nature of a business.

Governments are supposed to obey the law (unlike the Bush administration), but governments in a democracy have an obligation to give citizens the knowledge needed to make informed voting decisions.

The GOP doesn't believe this. Really, it's not in their DNA. They believe they know best, and the truth only confuses the masses. Government should be run like a corporation, and the masses should be told what they need to know.

Rule by the elite, knowledge for the elite, propaganda for the masses.

Give thanks to the public interest groups who sued to get the Bush GOP to obey the law. When I find out who they are, I'll look for a way to donate money to them. I'll post that here.

Vote Obama.

Bush III

Since the current Bush is Bush II, that makes McCain Bush III ..

McCain: I'd Spy on Americans Secretly, Too | Threat Level from Wired.com

If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president's wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday...

...McCain's new position plainly contradicts statements he made in a December 20, 2007 interview with the Boston Globe where he implicitly criticized Bush's five-year secret  end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act...

One the one hand, Barack Obama.

On the other hand, Bush III.

I think America is perfectly capable of electing another George W Bush.

Yep, I'm afraid.

Lessons from great software - FrameMaker

New, even in software, does not mean better …(via Gruber)

…DF reader Cory Johnson emailed to point out that Apple’s new Leopard Security Configuration book, released yesterday, was produced in Framemaker 6.0, too. As Tsai wrote last year:

Michael Tsai - Blog - Old Meets New (2007)

… The iPhone User’s Guide contains lots of interesting information about the iPhone. But the most interesting thing, to me, is that the document was created on a Mac using Adobe FrameMaker 6. This version of FrameMaker was released in 2000 and ran under Mac OS 8 and 9. FrameMaker 7.0, the last version that ran on Macs, was released in 2002. Old Mac OS software can run under Mac OS X in Classic, but only on PowerPC-based Macs, the last of which was discontinued almost a year ago. Apple is apparently using some old software and hardware to document its newest product. I totally understand; FrameMaker 6 is a great piece of software, and there’s nothing like it for Mac OS X…

FrameMaker is widely regarded as a work of genius. MORE 3.1 was a work of genius.

Neither of them will run on any computer hardware sold today -- and there are no truly equivalent products from any vendor (OmniOutliner comes closest to MORE).

Creating a product as massive and complex as these software solutions, and then sustaining an original design through many iterations – that’s a rare feat. We don’t know how it’s done. It’s a lot easier to see why similar projects fail.

My guess is that you need continuity of a few very good people over at least ten years, with superb recruitment and training of replacements. That means those people have to be incented and rewarded. I think Apple knows how to do that, I have trouble naming any other large publicly traded company who has the recipe. Maybe Google?

PS. Maybe I can sell my PPC iMac (runs classic!) to a Minnesotan running FrameMaker …

Why talk about The Singularity?

Well, for me it has the hypnotic ghastliness of a train wreck seen from a moderate distance, or the horror and wonder of a supernova seen from a very great distance*. Hard not to talk about those things.

On the other hand, I don't think that humanity can do anything about the Singularity one way or the other, so I wrote of the IEEE Singularity issue

..I'll read the articles and make note of anything novel, but I'd be surprised to find any new insights. This topic has been well discussed in geek circles. Now all we can do is wait and see what happens...

In his IEEE epilogue, Vinge replies to similar comments, making the case that under some circumstances there might be a role that an informed public could play ...

IEEE Spectrum: Signs of the Singularity

...Both Horgan and Nordmann express indignation that singularity speculation distracts from the many serious, real problems facing society. This is a reasonable position for anyone who considers the singularity to be bogus, but some form of the point should also be considered by less skeptical persons: if the singularity happens, the world passes beyond human ken. So isn't all our singularity chatter a waste of breath? There are reasons, some minor, some perhaps very important, for interest in the singularity. The topic has the same appeal as other great events in natural history (though I am more comfortable with such changes when they are at a paleontological remove). More practically, the notion of the singularity is simply a view of progress that we can use—along with other, competing, views—to interpret ongoing events and revise our local planning. And finally: if we are in a soft takeoff, then powerful components of superintelligence will be available well before any complete entity. Human planning and guidance could help avoid ghastliness, or even help create a world that is too good for us naturals to comprehend...

So if we have a 10-20 years notice that we're going to build artificial minds far more capable than the crude models in our heads, then maybe we could try to design the 1st generation to be both kindly (to us) and sentimental.  Doing that would require a lot of worldwide trust and cooperation, so it might help to think about the problem for a decade or two first.

Heck, it's worth a try.

I did laugh though at the thought that Singularity speculation is going to impede progress on, say, global warming. I suspect on the list of significant distractions this one is pretty far down  -- more's the pity.

* It's rarely mentioned that when those suckers go off they probably sterilize a zone 25-200 light years across. If life is as common as we think it is, the light of a mature galaxy supernova carries very grim news. (Immature galaxies need Supernovae to produce the elements that allow planets like ours to form. Supernovae giveth and taketh.)

IEEE - The Singularity Issue

Via Nick Carr I discover the professional journal of electrical engineers has devoted an entire issue to the Technological Singularity (aka The Singularity) beginning with a Vinge essay:

IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity

... The writer who first postulated the singularity answers skeptics and tells us what to look for as the world slips closer to the edge...

Well blow me down.

I was so surprised by the six article special issue I did a quick test to see if they'd referenced the "unavoidable Singularity" answer to the Fermi Paradox but they didn't.

As a card-carrying geek I am well versed in the Gospel of the Geeks, the Rapture of the Nerds and Ascension unto Silicon. I call that threat skynet, in honor of the governor of California.

Alas, as a confirmed unbeliever in the kindness of deities I would not expect much of us to survive even 8/10s of a Singularity, save perhaps as an arcane footnote.

I give much credit to IEEE for tackling the most unnerving of topics, and publishing an issue that, if we're still around in 100 years, will be endlessly mocked*. For more on the topic see my skynet thread, or the footnotes to my old Fermi Paradox page.

I'll read the articles and make note of anything novel, but I'd be surprised to find any new insights. This topic has been well discussed in geek circles. Now all we can do is wait and see what happens.

PS. My quote from the issue credits Vernor Vinge with the invention of the Singularity concept, but I see him more as the person who reified the Singularity in the popular mind. He brought it from a fuzzy concept in science fiction dating back to at least 1982 into the wider geek consciousness.

I have, by the way, an original copy of the issue of Whole Earth magazine where Vinge's first popular Singularity essay was published.

* Vis: Bill Joy. I think it's possible we won't see a Singularity by 2108, but if I'm sentient in 2040 and there's no sign of one beginning, I'll be inclined towards an even more peculiar, but very popular, explanation of the Fermi Paradox.

Auctorial

It's been a while since I came across an english word that was completely new to me:

Making Light: Just a lotta animals

...blatant auctorial favoritism...

Auctorial means by the design of the author.