Post-HIV America

A celebrity is found to have been cheating on his wife. That's unsurprising.

He's believed to have been cheating with a large number of women of professional and easy virtue. That's minimally interesting.

Nobody mentions HIV. That's truly noteworthy. My medical school career began with what we later called HIV, and now it's all but forgotten.

We're in post-HIV America.

PS. Nobody mentions the libidinous effects of large doses of androgens either.

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Update 12/19/09: NYT article on remembering a lost era - and lost people. HIV really has been forgotten.

Responding to Facebook’s lions: Stop friends using the apps

Facebook has made changes to their privacy settings that have two major consequences. The first is that the default settings now share much more information. The second is that users can no longer protect their social network from Facebook’s “Applications”.

Most of the media attention has been on how information is exposed to search engines such as Bing and Google. This is important, but there are complex workarounds. It’s not the most interesting or important consequence anyway.

The more important consequence is that Facebook’s shady App vendors (see: Scamville Furor, Facebook and the eBay disease) can no longer be blocked from accessing a player’s social network. So every App vendor has access to all player “friends” and all of the information they in turn make available in their public profiles. Remember that most of those public profiles now contain a great deal of personal data.

The Facebook Apps are “free”, but these vendors are not charities. They earn money by selling game goods, marketing extra-game services and products (some fraudulent), and by selling information. They will sell the social network information they harvest. They will also use that social network to find new “players” (aka “victims”).

To understand this it helps to think of Facebook as the African plains. In this metaphor Facebook users are rhinos and zebras and Facebook App vendors are lions.

Both rhinos and zebras graze on Facebook grass (photo sharing, social stories, contact information). They get along. So how are they different?

The rhinos don’t do Apps and they restrict access to their personal information. They’re tough and nasty; they don’t directly feed lions. The zebras, however, do Apps, and they travel in herds. They’re sleek, soft and vulnerable. Find one, you can find more. Lions eat zebras.

It’s messy for the zebras, but that’s how the market works. The Facebook ecosystem is a rich feeding ground, and lions have to eat.

Of course the Facebook ecosystem is more complex. Facebook rhinos and zebras are often friends and family. Even though lions don’t eat rhinos, FB lions find rhinos through their zebra friends. They then sell Rhino locations (information) to big game hunters (banks?) who sell Rhino horns for fertility potions (risk profiles).

The market world is different because rhinos and zebras can fight back. Not every vendor scores a 10 on Gordon’s scale of corporate evil; Google’s a mere 3 at the moment. There’s more than one way to make money – though the alternatives may mean a smaller IPO. On the other hand, Facebook’s current strategy runs the risk that IPO buyers will remember eBay.

It’s not clear that there’s anything to be done about Facebook. The corporate culture there is probably too much like 1990s Microsoft or 2010 Goldman Sachs for them to find another road. I’ve stopped encouraging my friends to join up with Facebook.

If you want to continue grazing Facebook’s grasslands however, and you don’t want to be lion fodder, there’s now only one possible response.

Convert your zebra friends to rhinos. Get them to stop using Apps. If they persist in using Apps, unfriend them. They’re leading the lions to you.

As of today, Facebook apps are the enemy.

Update: Great comment from Nettie. She refers us to Brad Stone's announcement of the EFF's complaint to the FTC - cosigned by ten other privacy organizations ...

... Ten other privacy organizations signed the complaint, including the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the American Library Association and the Consumer Federation of America. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canada has also been looking into Facebook’s privacy guidelines...

I think it's fair to say that the fan has been hit. Like Nettie, I've noticed people drifting away from FB ...

Another world - this one watery

Another week, another world. This one is wet (emphases mine) ...

.... The alien world known as GJ 1214b orbits a red dwarf star one-fifth the size of our own sun, 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, the astronomers reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Super-Earths - planets that are roughly two to 10 times Earth's mass - represent the hottest frontier in the years-long search for worlds beyond our solar system...

... Those planets orbit stars like our own sun, but the brightness of GJ 1214b's parent star is hundreds of times dimmer. The planet is also much closer to the star than any of our own solar system's planets, orbiting at a distance of only 1.3 million miles (2 million kilometers). That combination suggests that the planet's surface temperature would be about 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius), Charbonneau's research team reported.

... GJ 1214b was detected thanks to an innovative telescope system, a cleverly focused observation campaign - and perhaps a little bit of luck. The eight-telescope array, dubbed the MEarth Project, was set up at the Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona. The telescopes were programmed to gaze at 2,000 low-mass stars and check for slight, regular dips in light that could be caused by a dark planet's transit across the star's disk.

Relatively dim, relatively close stars were favored because the planet's dimming effect would be more noticeable than it would be with brighter, bigger, farther-out stars.

Just a few months after the MEarth Project began, graduate student Zachory Berta spotted the signature of GJ 1214b's 38-hour orbit. Based on the pattern of the dimming, the team figured out that the planet was 2.7 times as wide as Earth.

The astronomers then turned to another instrument, the HARPS spectrometer on the European Southern Observatory's La Silla telescope in Chile, to figure out the planet's mass. Such mass calculations depend on another technique that checks for the slight wobble in a star's motion caused by a planet's gravitational pull. The HARPS observations indicated that the planet was 6.55 times as massive as Earth.

Putting those measurements together, the team was able to model the planet's density and composition. The best fit for the data was a mixture consisting of about three-quarters water and other ices, one-quarter rock and a gaseous atmosphere.

... Although the surface temperature on GJ 1214b would be well above water's boiling point on Earth's surface, Charbonneau said the planet could nonetheless possess an exotic form of liquid water due to extreme atmospheric pressure at the surface. In today's news release, Berta said the pressure may turn at least some of the water into a rare crystalline form known as ice-seven.

"Despite its hot temperature, this appears to be a water world," Berta said.

On Earth, organisms have been found living near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where superheated water is held under high pressure. But Charbonneau said he wouldn't want to bet that life could endure under GJ 1214b's crushing conditions.

In fact, it's too early to bet heavily on any detailed description of GJ 1214b. Fortunately, Charbonneau said, the star is close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope could someday analyze the composition of the planet's atmosphere. "That will make it the first super-Earth with a confirmed atmosphere - even though that atmosphere probably won't be hospitable to life as we know it," he said...

... The larger implication of the Nature study is that other super-Earths may be waiting out there with just the right conditions for life. "We found this planet in the first six months," Charbonneau noted. "We had only looked at a small fraction of the stars that we planned to look at through the entire project. That means that either we got really lucky - which is possible - or these planets are common."

Red dwarf planets are tidally locked, so one side would be very hot and another side very cold. In between?

The next two years are expected to bring news of hundreds of planets - maybe thousands. We're filling in terms in the Drake equation, and making the "great quiet" ever more unsettling.

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Alzheimer's and obesity: it's not the fat, it's the leptin?

It's puzzled me that obesity was associated with earlier onset of Alzheimer's. It makes sense that both the obesity and the dementia might arise from a common cause ...

BBC News - Alzheimer's risk linked to level of appetite hormone

High levels of a hormone that controls appetite appear to be linked to a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, US research suggests.

The 12-year-study of 200 volunteers found those with the lowest levels of leptin were more likely to develop the disease than those with the highest.

The JAMA study builds on work that links low leptin levels to the brain plaques found in Alzheimer's patients....

... Research on mice - conducted to establish why obese patients with diabetes often have long-term memory problems - found those who received doses of leptin were far more adept at negotiating their way through a maze.

The latest research, carried out at Boston University Medical Center, involved regular brain scans on 198 older volunteers over a 12-year period.

A quarter of those with the lowest levels of leptin went on to develop Alzheimer's disease, compared with 6% of those with the highest levels.

"If our findings our confirmed by others, leptin levels in older adults may serve as one of several possible biomarkers for healthy brain ageing and, more importantly, may open new pathways for possible preventive and therapeutic intervention."...

That's a huge relative risk - a 4 times higher incidence of dementia. Note that the mouse did better when given leptin (though mice seem to do better with just about anything). There's some interest in using leptin to prevent and treat Alzheimer's.

Note that elevated insulin levels have previously been associated with increased Alzheimer's risk.

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15 cigarettes yields 1 mutation - the new world of cancer genetics

I remember when "oncogenes" were on the cover of TIME. They were the key to understanding malignancy, and would change the ballgame. That was about 30 years ago.

Now that handful of oncogenes have become tens of thousands of mutations ...

BBC News - Scientists crack 'entire genetic code' of cancer

... scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure.

The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure.

From this, the experts estimate a typical smoker acquires one new mutation for every 15 cigarettes they smoke.

Although many of these mutations will be harmless, some will trigger cancer...

We used to think a cancer involved a few mutations. Maybe two or three. Not 23,000.

It takes an astounding number of mutations to knock off the systems that prevent cancer -- while managing not to kill the cell.

Among other things we now have a good explanation of why cancer risk falls after someone stops smoking. It appears that the mutated cells are replaced by healthy cells. If they're lucky the bad ones die off before one goes rogue.

So it's never too late to stop - or to get out of the sun.

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The most marvelous world of the virus

A superb essay on the virus ...

A Gazillion Tiny Avatars - Olivia Judson - NYTimes.com

.... whether you count viruses as living or not, there’s an awfully large number of them: a single drop of seawater may contain more than 10 million viral particles. That’s more than 10 billion in a liter (two-and-a-bit pints) of ocean. Some people have estimated that, in the oceans, there’s more carbon stashed away in viruses than there would be in 75 million blue whales.

Moreover, viruses are extremely diverse; there are zillions of different kinds. Some, such as MS2, a virus that attacks bacteria like Escherichia coli, have as few as four genes. Others, such as the gargantuan Mimivirus, have more than 900. (Mimivirus mostly attacks amoebae, although it is also suspected of occasionally causing pneumonia in humans.) And each time we look in a new place, we find more and more viruses that are different from those we have known before.

Fortunately for us, most viruses don’t attack humans; they attack bacteria and other microbes, which they kill on a colossal scale. In the oceans alone, viruses are reckoned to kill about 100 million metric-tons’-worth of microbes every minute.

.... viruses play a fundamental role in regulating the food chain. This is because death-by-virus is different from death-by-predator. When a predator kills a microbe, it consumes it: the microbe’s cell is incorporated into the predator’s body. In contrast, when a virus kills a microbe, the microbe’s cell bursts open, or “lyses,” releasing new viruses and a lot of cellular debris back into the environment. This debris can then be consumed by other microbes. In other words, by lysing their victims, viruses are constantly making food available to other life forms...

So do bacteria have a fundamentally different relationship to viruses than multicellular organisms? Why are they so much more lethal to bacteria than to us? Did the way our DNA propagates facilitate a "truce" with viruses?
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Never a good feeling – an attack on my Google account

Someone just made 3 attempts to reset my Google Password. The reset notice I received includes this statement …

… If you've received this mail in error, it's likely that another user entered
your email address by mistake while trying to reset a password. If you didn't
initiate the request, you don't need to take any further action and can safely
disregard this email….

A mistake. Suurre it’s a mistake.

I have a robust Google password, but the risk here is that someone has access to a secondary account that receives my Google password reset requests. Those have robust passwords too, but there are always weaknesses.

Just to be on the safe side I’ve reviewed my Google accounts password recovery options and they look good.

Brrr. I hate passwords. I’d have bet good money in 1996 that we’d have robust biometric authentication by now. I’d have lost every penny. A good lesson about predicting the future.

Update 11/18/09: Amit Agarwal was hacked around the same time I was attacked. It's not clear how they hacked in.

The ultimate climate conspiracy …

If I were an alien entity observing the earth, and I wanted to test humanity to the breaking point, I’d come up with a scheme that required China, India, America, Canada, Australia and the rest of the world to come together to solve a huge problem with uncertain consequences that unfolds relatively slowly and requires painful action from everyone on a time scale of years.

A trans-galactic gambling scheme? An alien art form?

Cue twilight zone music.

The common core of human language – as shown in speech recognition systems

Just one phrase in a wonder filled post on Google’s new Japanese speech recognition system …

…speech recognition systems are surprisingly similar across different languages…

I bet some Google researcher has a multi-axial plot of the speech recognition attributes of the languages they work with. That will be a great graphic one day soon.

The essay is required reading. How the hell does anyone learn to write Japanese? Yes, I know people do it, but, really, how?

Most of all, this essay is a small measure of what Google does, and why I swear allegiance to the House of Google (3 on Gordon’s scale of evil). These are gray days in America, but we will return …

Understanding secure systems: The Chromium extension example

This very brief Google Chromium blog posting gives a lovely view into modern secure system design ...

Chromium Blog: Security in Depth: The Extension System

... To help protect against vulnerabilities in benign-but-buggy extensions, we employ the time-tested principles of least privilege and privilege separation...

The original has wikipedia* links to relevant articles. These principles are broader than computer security. Think of them when you provide access to your Facebook information.

"Least privilege" and "Privilege Separation" should be a part of grade school and high school curriculum.

If you want lots more detail, the authors refer us to their academic treatise on securing browser extensions.

I love blogs.

*Yeah, Knol was a bad idea.
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Lazy journalism and the both sides fallacy – Ed Lotterman edition

A classic example of the lazy journalism of false equivalency …

Edward Lotterman – Real World Economics – Pioneer Press (TwinCities.com)

… Unlike in most other industrialized nations, U.S. citizens remain divided on whether climate change is really occurring. Indeed, the proportion that is skeptical is growing rather than shrinking…

…This is not a lack of consensus, but rather a fundamental division that is not likely to be solved in the foreseeable future. For significant portions of both camps, it has become a matter of faith rather than reason…

When one camp is aligned with the overwhelming majority of the peer reviewed and respected scientific literature, and the other camp is not, this is not a “matter of faith rather than reason”.

One camp is on the side of reason, the other camp is faith-based.

This is, at best, a lazy invocation of the easy cliché. Most likely, it’s intellectual cowardice.

The historic pricing of an Ella Fitzgerald CD set

This range of prices for Twelve Nights In Hollywood: Ella Fitzgerald feels historic ...

List price CD: $70
Amazon CD: $56
iTunes AAC (256 kpbs, AAC encoded*): $40
Amazon MP3 (256 kpbs, LAME encoded): $34.31 (why the 31 cents?)

The Amazon MP3 is less than half the cost of list price CD.

I'd like a physical CD for Emily's gift, but at this price I'll burn a single representative sample from 50 song collection and put the entire set on her iPhone Christmas eve.

Oh, and the Amazon CD is "temporarily out of stock" anyway.

CD R.I.P. We may miss you yet.

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Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 1st edition

Top end of the scale is 15. It's a linear scale.

1. Philip Morris: 15
2. Exxon: 13 (see link to #1)
3. Goldman Sachs: 12
4. Facebook: 12
5. For profit health insurance companies: 11
6. AT&T and Verizon (tied): 10
   
7. Microsoft: 10
   
8. Average publicly traded company: 8
9. Google: 6 (revised up after the Google Buzz fiasco, then down when they showed some wisdom)
10. Apple: 5
11. CARE International: 1 (They're not a PTC, so this is merely a non-evil reference point)

What's your ranking?

Update 12/15/09: I added Exxon thanks to a comment and because of the Philip Morris synergy. Exxon's astroturf climate change denialism (see also) campaign puts them in contention for the most evil publicly traded company of the modern era.

Update 1/6/10: Both Google and Facebook moved one notch up the evil scale. Google because of their arrogant, haphazard and uncaring Pages to Sites migration and Facebook because they sold their users out to their often crooked "Apps" vendors. Facebook is now more evil than Microsoft, and Google is tied with Apple.

Update 2/16/10: Google had dropped to '3' after unblocking China, but then leaps to '8' after the Google Buzz fiasco.

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It's not AT&T's fault, it's the iPhone?

My gut finds this persuasive ...

Digital Domain - AT&T Takes the Fall for the iPhone’s Glitches - NYTimes.com

... When I set about looking for independent data, however, to confirm the superior performance of Verizon’s network, I was astonished to discover that I had managed to get things exactly wrong. Despite the well-publicized problems in New York and San Francisco, AT&T seems to have the superior network nationwide.

And the iPhone itself may not be so great after all. Its design is contributing to performance problems.

Roger Entner, senior vice president for telecommunications research at Nielsen, said the iPhone’s “air interface,” the electronics in the phone that connect it to the cell towers, had shortcomings that “affect both voice and data.” He said that in the eyes of the consumer, “the iPhone has the nimbus of infallibility, ergo, it’s AT&T’s fault.” AT&T does not publicly defend itself because it will not criticize Apple under any circumstances, he said. AT&T and Apple both declined to comment on Mr. Entner’s assessments.

Neither AT&T nor Verizon was willing to reveal its internal data on performance. But Global Wireless Solutions, one of the third-party services that run network tests for the major carriers, shared some of its current findings. The service dispatches drivers across the country with phones and laptops equipped with data cards. They have covered more than three million miles of roads this year, while running almost two million wireless data sessions and placing more than three million voice calls, said Paul Carter, the president.

The results place AT&T’s data network not just on top, but well ahead of everyone else. “AT&T’s data throughput is 40 to 50 percent higher than the competition, including Verizon,” Mr. Carter said. AT&T is a client and Verizon is not, he added.

Why do I find this persuasive, even though one of the sources gets AT&T money?

1. We only hear my fellow iPhone users screaming about AT&T quality.
2. Remember Apple's rivals saying Apple didn't have the engineering background to make a quality cell phone? I suspect this is what they were talking about. Apple did amazingly well, but perfection is not human.
3. Quality and reliability are not Apple's top priority (most recent example: my 2 day old flickering, stuttering, $2K iMac i5). It's not in their DNA.
   

Mind you, I despise AT&T. I think they'll shaft their customers whenever they can get away with it. Apple is flawed, but they're still better than everybody else. It's just that this time, when it comes to phone service, I suspect Apple is at least as flawed as AT&T.

Update 12/13/09: If the iPhone does have technical limitations that cause connection issues, is this why AT&T has not allowed tethering?

Update 12/14/09: Two rebuttals from Gruber: One, Two. The second points to Pete Mortensen, who shows the form of the question changes the answers.

A really tough cop ...

This is impressive ...

In Holiday Crush, a Fatal Shootout in Times Sq. - NYTimes.com

... The video showed Mr. Martinez turning, the police said, but he moved out of camera range. Police officials, who did not immediately release the video, said it also showed the sergeant reaching for his weapon and raising it.

It also showed Sergeant Newsom, who has been on the force for 17 years, raising his left arm over his chest in hopes of protecting his heart. It is a defensive move rookies are taught in the Police Academy. Police officials were astonished that the sergeant, less than 15 feet from the stubby barrel of a semiautomatic weapon with no hope of taking cover, was cool-headed enough to remember to do so.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Mr. Martinez fired first, getting off two shots. Then his gun jammed.

Mr. Kelly said the sergeant fired four shots. All four hit Mr. Martinez: in the chest, below the neck and in the left arm; he also suffered a graze wound to the right arm...

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