Others have explained the existing, simple (but admittedly blurry) scientific definition of a species. It has nothing to do with sociology---though your "crack smokin'" stereotypes do. It was coined long before any notions of political correctness. Here is the BBC's summary of the implications of the results of the Human Genome Mapping Project's first draft for your hysterical race theories. The BBC, as far as I know, does not have a radical left-liberal agenda, but, hey what do I know?---I might work for the Medical Research Council's Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre, but I'm still a mongrel sociologist.
IANAT, but IAAB (I am a biologist/bioinformaticist). Your points are valid. I'm struck, however, by the similarity with opinions once expressed about the Human Genome Project (HuGeP). Many biomedical scientists were rationally skeptical---"but even a trained molecular biologist can only sequence N base pairs a year!"---when it (the HuGeP) was proposed. As biology becomes more oriented towards "grandiose" projects like this we (biologists) may find ourselves eating our own words more frequently. Big science/technology done with proper financial and political backing has demonstrated time again that the "impossible" is usually just bloody difficult---or just bloody difficult to imagine. We've put men on the moon, simulated the Big Bang, tunnelled through mountains, sustained Moore's Law for decades and now we can even lose up to 6lbs in two weeks(TM) eating a tasty cereal. You also describe the aftermath of mega-taxonomy hunts and it sounds a lot like the problems people are now having recruiting enough good bioinformaticists to help biologists and medics make the most of the fruits of the various genome projects.
Never mind "political correctness", how about a little "correctness"? I'd have hoped it was too obvious to comment, but "Caucasians, Mongoloids and Negroids" are not different species---or even "groups of species". My mother is black African and my father is white European. I've not done any PCRs or cytology, but I'm prepared to bet my net worth that they are both Homo sapiens and I'm damned sure they have the same number of chromosomes as each other. The reason I love science is that racist factoids (for example the idea that there is any really significant genetic difference between blacks and whites) can be disproved by experiment.
As a singer and militant geek anything which takes the ultimate in undertalented, overrated, overpaid middlemen (and they are usually "men") out of the loop (excuse pun) is fine by me.
I've only "interacted" with Paul Nurse in the flesh once. It was when I was studying in Oxford and he was Head of a Department where I was doing an undergraduate project. I asked him over the phone for an appointment. He invited me into his office and made time in a busy day to sit and talk with a complete nobody like me about what I should do with my scientific career. I really appreciated it and I've been rooting for him to win The Prize over the several years he's been tipped to get it.
Incidentally, I work at the Institute of Cancer Research in London ("the ICR"---not to be confused with "the ICRF") and am about to move to do more bioinformatics at the Genome Campus in Cambridge so I've visited the ICRF quite often over the past five years to meet up with bioinformatics scientists there. Most times I use the lifts (that's "elevators" to you colonials) Paul Nurse is posted the "winner" in their Health and Safety Department's "Hall of Shame" for workers caught eating and drinking most often in the labs.
This will make a great example for my next lecture on classic flaws in common argument.
Non sequitur
The essence of your last paragraph is that "non-obvious" code should be patentable.
Putting aside the difficulty that some large corporations have with the definition of the phrase "non obvious", my (and many other people's) objection to the patenting of code is a fundamental philosophical one which applies to all code: patenting logic is absurd. The underlying logic for this is, I assume, that patenting intangible algorithms is like patenting things you can walk up to and fire a nerf gun at---which also have to be "non-obvious" to qualify for IP bodyguards to protecting from geeks with projectile toys. The point is patents are (or should be) about specifics, not about generalities and the definition of an algorithm implies generality (cf. the patenting of a gene, vs the patenting of a specific antagonist to a specific gene product).
Sure, copyright the implementation and (do your best to ) control its distribution if that's what you want, but don't prevent me from tackling a problem with a similar approach. You can patent a water pump, but you should not be allowed to patent the idea of water pumps.
Unsupported assertion
"Research should be protected"
"No patents, no more R&D."
This is demonstrably rot. I used to work at the Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford where they developed the therapeutic use of penicillin. They didn't even patent the method of extraction let alone the application. The researchers' incentives were saving lives and winning kudos (like GNU/Linux). It's very likely that you are only alive to write your post because they made the fruits of their research freely available.
Now I work in bioinformatics with the fruits of the ("Open Source") Human Genome Project at the Institute of Cancer Research. Perhaps someone here will find something in The Code that will save you from cancer so you can carry on posting nonsense into your 90s.
The two most powerful designed interfaces I use are my computer keyboard and my (digital) piano keyboard. To me they are intuitive, but that's because I use them every day. In both cases I am rarely doing one thing at time. In both cases no one has devised a mechanism which improves significantly on them---in performing the same tasks, that is.
However, although they nod towards the "human"---the key sizes relate to the size of human fingers---neither interface could in anyway be described as "humane", in the sense referred to in the book, especially from the point of view of the new user.
This is the nature of life. Life is difficult. Life is hard work. (If you'd heard my piano playing you'd know how painfully true this is. But this is only a matter of time; practice makes perfect.)
The point I am trying to make is that the most powerful and popular interfaces are the ones which offer maximum speed and control---not the ones which have the shallowest learning curve, not the ones which focus on one task at a time, not the ones which confuse the user least.
Remember learning to walk, or learning to invert your vision? Quite a few million years of evolution went into "designing" the interfaces between your brain and your legs/eyes. It still hurts learning to use them. But look at the pay-off. I mean literally...
I think what the guy is saying is that a little bit of piracy never did anyone any harm---least of all the recording/software companies. There is a huge and (for obvious reasons) unacknowledged gulf between what M$/$ony [insert your favourite IP "robber-barons" here] say they want (in court) and what they actually want (as evinced by, say, their internal emails). Short-term, small-scale piracy often leads to long-term, large-scale sales, but no one must ever admit this in public.
When WordPerfect was the wordprocessor it suited M$ for wage slaves to copy their work Word disks onto their home machines. M$ gained no market share from this, but they did gain mindshare. As Word becomes the dominant product it makes sense for M$ to go in heavy. Once 100% of the World's population use IE, and M$ start charging for it, expect half-men-half-spare-part baldies with gratuitous LEDs and a taste for black clothing to come round to your place in a cube-shaped winnebago (sp?) and ask you why you don't want to, er, "get with the program".
Similarly, when you're an up-and-coming metal outfit hampered by embarrassing Scandinavian musician=ABBA associations you're only too grateful when people start bootlegging your demos. Later on, when you need a fjord to store your royalties, maybe your outlook changes somewhat...
I am responsible for bioinformatics at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. Back in '97 I submitted a proposal to O'Reilly for an introductory bioinformatics book. They said that it sounded interesting, but that no one would buy it...
You probably have a point there---I wrote this just after getting out of bed in the morning; which is also why I called the PRS the "Publishing Rights Society" instead of the "Performing Right Society".
In the UK press there are hundreds of ads for absurdly expensive "services" "selling" ringtones of chart songs at £1 a time. I suspect they are not run by the sorts of people who regularly 'fess up to the PRS (Publishing Rights Society). I've never owned a mobile, but if I did (and had the bad taste to want to draw attention to myself with the latest from Destiny's Child bleeping out from my crotch) I'd rather my £1 went to Beyonce than some dodgy geezer in a lock-up in the East End of London.
To get a handle on just how hopeless Mogg's predictions have been in the past just check out this this article by Francis Wheen. Scroll down to the paragraph headed "The Guru Has Spoken".
I have to admit that I practically choked on the (absurdly late) sandwich lunch I was eating when I caught sight of the original post on the usually clueful Slashdot site. Rees-Mogg may have edited the Times, but he is still (IMHO) an upper class, establishment nitwit of the highest (lowest?) order. Incidentally, for those of you reading outside the UK, the "London" Times is no longer considered the "newspaper of record" here. It has declined shockingly since becoming part of that "Virtual Merchant State", the Murdoch media empire. Wheen, on the other hand, writes for the Guardian, probably the best broadsheet newspaper in Britain today (and the only one with any real claim to independence). He is that rare thing, a commentator I frequently disagree with violently, but who always gets my attention. William "Lord" Rees-Mogg isn't.
It's good that hackers are well-informed and principled enough to think it matters. This happens to be my area of interest; I'm responsible for Bioinformatics at the Institute of Cancer Research in the UK. A couple of weeks back I went to an excellent talk by a clever guy call Ewan Birney from the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, UK. He is writing code to catalogue and annotate the assembled sequences in real time as they come off the mammoth robot sequencing "production line". In one of those rare occasions where the British are leading a "big science" project the Centre has been responsible for the largest fraction of the Human Genome sequenced at any single institute. The code does stuff like figure out which bits of the sequence are real genes and which bits are that 90%+ of so-called "junk DNA" you might have heard of and also attempts to assign provisional functions to the genes by various computational means. Eventually people in white coats will have to confirm such assignments properly, but it's important to beat the drug companies to making good guesses.
Ewan's code and all the data are entirely Open Source. If you've got a good reason and a reasonable Pentium with lots of memory and a 30Gb hard disk you could mirror the human genome and get it updated every night. (I feel strange just typing that sentence and I've been following this story for years). The Wellcome Trust and others (including US and European government agencies) funding the project are keeping everything Open because that's the way science is done and because this will subvert commercial attempts to stake a claim on our species' genetic heritage. (Er, go Wellcome!)
Biochemists often talk about the "rate limiting step" in a reaction---the single point which sets the speed of the whole process---like a bottleneck. As far as I understood Ewan's talk (if you're reading this Ewan, please put me right), the rate-limiting step with the Genome Project isn't the assembly of the sequenced stretches of DNA (or "contigs") as the original poster suggests, but the collection of the data in the first place. At the Sanger they have clusters of PCs and Alphas crunching the contigs---distributing the effort would give us all a warm fuzzy feeling, but wouldn't be essential. Again, I may be wrong about this.
One thing that definitely is a priority is making some sense out of all of this information. What would be great would be if members of the global community of hackers started taking molecular biology and biochemistry classes so they could write code to help people like me make sense of the embarrassment of riches that the project is creating. I'm off to Cambridge in two weeks to the Bioinformatics Open Software Development meeting to listen to some project leaders talk and discuss the existing efforts. Personally, I would love to give crash courses in biology to programmers with time on their hands in an effort to harness their collective genius rather than sponsor an effort to write a contig-crunching client to harness their collective spare cycles, but I have no idea how such a thing could be organised. Any ideas?
I used to work for a company of on-line scientific publishers in London. They ripped me off so I started looking for another job and was fired when someone else answered a call to my desk from a headhunter. In the year-and-a-half since I left I have doubled the salary they paid me.
What's interesting is that while I was there I watched their recruitment policy in action. They didn't state salaries in advertisements, but asked applicants to state their requirements with their applications. Despite this, they always had a specific maximum in mind when they placed an ad. Any application asking for more that figure was instantly binned. Usually the only ones left were women as they tended to have lower expectations/demands.
I was replaced by two women (one less well qualified) each working for 5000GBP less than I was. God knows how they could afford to eat. Employers claim to like women employees because they're "flexible", i.e. easy to walk all over, happy to earn a second salary etc etc.
My sister teaches employment law and is a union representative in her college. Her catchphrase is: "Women are their own worst enemies".
Slashdot Mirror
How does one say it in English?
Please God, don't let this turn into another one of those inane Slashdot debates about low paid Indian IT workers "flooding" the US jobs market.
You know the sort of thing: "I'm not racist, but how are we supposed to compete? Some of them are prepared to work for chickenfeed."
Please God, don't let this turn into another one of those inane Slashdot debates about low paid Indian IT workers "flooding" the US jobs market.
You know the sort of thing: "I'm not racist, but how are we supposed to compete? Some of them are prepared to work for chickenfeed."
Others have explained the existing, simple (but admittedly blurry) scientific definition of a species.
It has nothing to do with sociology---though your "crack smokin'" stereotypes do.
It was coined long before any notions of political correctness.
Here is the BBC's summary of the implications of the results of the Human Genome Mapping Project's first draft for your hysterical race theories.
The BBC, as far as I know, does not have a radical left-liberal agenda, but, hey what do I know?---I might work for the Medical Research Council's Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre, but I'm still a mongrel sociologist.
IANAT, but IAAB (I am a biologist/bioinformaticist).
Your points are valid. I'm struck, however, by the similarity with opinions once expressed about the Human Genome Project (HuGeP).
Many biomedical scientists were rationally skeptical---"but even a trained molecular biologist can only sequence N base pairs a year!"---when it (the HuGeP) was proposed. As biology becomes more oriented towards "grandiose" projects like this we (biologists) may find ourselves eating our own words more frequently.
Big science/technology done with proper financial and political backing has demonstrated time again that the "impossible" is usually just bloody difficult---or just bloody difficult to imagine. We've put men on the moon, simulated the Big Bang, tunnelled through mountains, sustained Moore's Law for decades and now we can even lose up to 6lbs in two weeks(TM) eating a tasty cereal.
You also describe the aftermath of mega-taxonomy hunts and it sounds a lot like the problems people are now having recruiting enough good bioinformaticists to help biologists and medics make the most of the fruits of the various genome projects.
Never mind "political correctness", how about a little "correctness"?
I'd have hoped it was too obvious to comment, but "Caucasians, Mongoloids and Negroids" are not different species---or even "groups of species".
My mother is black African and my father is white European. I've not done any PCRs or cytology, but I'm prepared to bet my net worth that they are both Homo sapiens and I'm damned sure they have the same number of chromosomes as each other.
The reason I love science is that racist factoids (for example the idea that there is any really significant genetic difference between blacks and whites) can be disproved by experiment.
As a singer and militant geek anything which takes the ultimate in undertalented, overrated, overpaid middlemen (and they are usually "men") out of the loop (excuse pun) is fine by me.
I've only "interacted" with Paul Nurse in the flesh once. It was when I was studying in Oxford and he was Head of a Department where I was doing an undergraduate project. I asked him over the phone for an appointment. He invited me into his office and made time in a busy day to sit and talk with a complete nobody like me about what I should do with my scientific career. I really appreciated it and I've been rooting for him to win The Prize over the several years he's been tipped to get it.
Incidentally, I work at the Institute of Cancer Research in London ("the ICR"---not to be confused with "the ICRF") and am about to move to do more bioinformatics at the Genome Campus in Cambridge so I've visited the ICRF quite often over the past five years to meet up with bioinformatics scientists there. Most times I use the lifts (that's "elevators" to you colonials) Paul Nurse is posted the "winner" in their Health and Safety Department's "Hall of Shame" for workers caught eating and drinking most often in the labs.
...not taking the time to learn to touch type is definitely handicapping yourself unnecessarily.
When people ask me how to speed up their computers I say: "Get a copy of Mavis Beacon!".
"Books on demand" sounds wonderful until you realize that this kind of technology is already offering publishers new ways to screw authors.
Andrew Malcom is an author (and all-round brave and persistent guy) who has been taking on dodgy academic publishing practices for years.
Read his article for the full story.
Compare and contrast the following with particular attention to the continuing absence of pragmatism and rigour in modern political theory:
This will make a great example for my next lecture on classic flaws in common argument.
Non sequitur
The essence of your last paragraph is that "non-obvious" code should be patentable.
Putting aside the difficulty that some large corporations have with the definition of the phrase "non obvious", my (and many other people's) objection to the patenting of code is a fundamental philosophical one which applies to all code: patenting logic is absurd. The underlying logic for this is, I assume, that patenting intangible algorithms is like patenting things you can walk up to and fire a nerf gun at---which also have to be "non-obvious" to qualify for IP bodyguards to protecting from geeks with projectile toys. The point is patents are (or should be) about specifics, not about generalities and the definition of an algorithm implies generality (cf. the patenting of a gene, vs the patenting of a specific antagonist to a specific gene product).
Sure, copyright the implementation and (do your best to ) control its distribution if that's what you want, but don't prevent me from tackling a problem with a similar approach. You can patent a water pump, but you should not be allowed to patent the idea of water pumps.
Unsupported assertion
This is demonstrably rot. I used to work at the Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford where they developed the therapeutic use of penicillin. They didn't even patent the method of extraction let alone the application. The researchers' incentives were saving lives and winning kudos (like GNU/Linux). It's very likely that you are only alive to write your post because they made the fruits of their research freely available.
Now I work in bioinformatics with the fruits of the ("Open Source") Human Genome Project at the Institute of Cancer Research. Perhaps someone here will find something in The Code that will save you from cancer so you can carry on posting nonsense into your 90s.
IBM would get even more cheap publicity if they started selling "Peace, Love, Linux" T-shirts. Anyone know where I might buy one?
The two most powerful designed interfaces I use are my computer keyboard and my (digital) piano keyboard. To me they are intuitive, but that's because I use them every day. In both cases I am rarely doing one thing at time. In both cases no one has devised a mechanism which improves significantly on them---in performing the same tasks, that is.
However, although they nod towards the "human"---the key sizes relate to the size of human fingers---neither interface could in anyway be described as "humane", in the sense referred to in the book, especially from the point of view of the new user.
This is the nature of life. Life is difficult. Life is hard work. (If you'd heard my piano playing you'd know how painfully true this is. But this is only a matter of time; practice makes perfect.)
The point I am trying to make is that the most powerful and popular interfaces are the ones which offer maximum speed and control---not the ones which have the shallowest learning curve, not the ones which focus on one task at a time, not the ones which confuse the user least.
Remember learning to walk, or learning to invert your vision? Quite a few million years of evolution went into "designing" the interfaces between your brain and your legs/eyes. It still hurts learning to use them. But look at the pay-off. I mean literally...
I think what the guy is saying is that a little bit of piracy never did anyone any harm---least of all the recording/software companies. There is a huge and (for obvious reasons) unacknowledged gulf between what M$/$ony [insert your favourite IP "robber-barons" here] say they want (in court) and what they actually want (as evinced by, say, their internal emails). Short-term, small-scale piracy often leads to long-term, large-scale sales, but no one must ever admit this in public.
When WordPerfect was the wordprocessor it suited M$ for wage slaves to copy their work Word disks onto their home machines. M$ gained no market share from this, but they did gain mindshare. As Word becomes the dominant product it makes sense for M$ to go in heavy. Once 100% of the World's population use IE, and M$ start charging for it, expect half-men-half-spare-part baldies with gratuitous LEDs and a taste for black clothing to come round to your place in a cube-shaped winnebago (sp?) and ask you why you don't want to, er, "get with the program".
Similarly, when you're an up-and-coming metal outfit hampered by embarrassing Scandinavian musician=ABBA associations you're only too grateful when people start bootlegging your demos. Later on, when you need a fjord to store your royalties, maybe your outlook changes somewhat...
I am responsible for bioinformatics at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. Back in '97 I submitted a proposal to O'Reilly for an introductory bioinformatics book. They said that it sounded interesting, but that no one would buy it...
You probably have a point there---I wrote this just after getting out of bed in the morning; which is also why I called the PRS the "Publishing Rights Society" instead of the "Performing Right Society".
In the UK press there are hundreds of ads for absurdly expensive "services" "selling" ringtones of chart songs at £1 a time. I suspect they are not run by the sorts of people who regularly 'fess up to the PRS (Publishing Rights Society). I've never owned a mobile, but if I did (and had the bad taste to want to draw attention to myself with the latest from Destiny's Child bleeping out from my crotch) I'd rather my £1 went to Beyonce than some dodgy geezer in a lock-up in the East End of London.
VADER: It is your destiny. Join me, and we can rule the galaxy as father and son. Come with me. It's the only way.
To get a handle on just how hopeless Mogg's predictions have been in the past just check out this this article by Francis Wheen. Scroll down to the paragraph headed "The Guru Has Spoken". I have to admit that I practically choked on the (absurdly late) sandwich lunch I was eating when I caught sight of the original post on the usually clueful Slashdot site. Rees-Mogg may have edited the Times, but he is still (IMHO) an upper class, establishment nitwit of the highest (lowest?) order. Incidentally, for those of you reading outside the UK, the "London" Times is no longer considered the "newspaper of record" here. It has declined shockingly since becoming part of that "Virtual Merchant State", the Murdoch media empire. Wheen, on the other hand, writes for the Guardian, probably the best broadsheet newspaper in Britain today (and the only one with any real claim to independence). He is that rare thing, a commentator I frequently disagree with violently, but who always gets my attention. William "Lord" Rees-Mogg isn't.
It's good that hackers are well-informed and principled enough to think it matters. This happens to be my area of interest; I'm responsible for Bioinformatics at the Institute of Cancer Research in the UK. A couple of weeks back I went to an excellent talk by a clever guy call Ewan Birney from the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, UK. He is writing code to catalogue and annotate the assembled sequences in real time as they come off the mammoth robot sequencing "production line". In one of those rare occasions where the British are leading a "big science" project the Centre has been responsible for the largest fraction of the Human Genome sequenced at any single institute. The code does stuff like figure out which bits of the sequence are real genes and which bits are that 90%+ of so-called "junk DNA" you might have heard of and also attempts to assign provisional functions to the genes by various computational means. Eventually people in white coats will have to confirm such assignments properly, but it's important to beat the drug companies to making good guesses.
Ewan's code and all the data are entirely Open Source. If you've got a good reason and a reasonable Pentium with lots of memory and a 30Gb hard disk you could mirror the human genome and get it updated every night. (I feel strange just typing that sentence and I've been following this story for years). The Wellcome Trust and others (including US and European government agencies) funding the project are keeping everything Open because that's the way science is done and because this will subvert commercial attempts to stake a claim on our species' genetic heritage. (Er, go Wellcome!)
Biochemists often talk about the "rate limiting step" in a reaction---the single point which sets the speed of the whole process---like a bottleneck. As far as I understood Ewan's talk (if you're reading this Ewan, please put me right), the rate-limiting step with the Genome Project isn't the assembly of the sequenced stretches of DNA (or "contigs") as the original poster suggests, but the collection of the data in the first place. At the Sanger they have clusters of PCs and Alphas crunching the contigs---distributing the effort would give us all a warm fuzzy feeling, but wouldn't be essential. Again, I may be wrong about this.
One thing that definitely is a priority is making some sense out of all of this information. What would be great would be if members of the global community of hackers started taking molecular biology and biochemistry classes so they could write code to help people like me make sense of the embarrassment of riches that the project is creating. I'm off to Cambridge in two weeks to the Bioinformatics Open Software Development meeting to listen to some project leaders talk and discuss the existing efforts. Personally, I would love to give crash courses in biology to programmers with time on their hands in an effort to harness their collective genius rather than sponsor an effort to write a contig-crunching client to harness their collective spare cycles, but I have no idea how such a thing could be organised. Any ideas?
I used to work for a company of on-line scientific publishers in London. They ripped me off so I started looking for another job and was fired when someone else answered a call to my desk from a headhunter. In the year-and-a-half since I left I have doubled the salary they paid me.
What's interesting is that while I was there I watched their recruitment policy in action. They didn't state salaries in advertisements, but asked applicants to state their requirements with their applications. Despite this, they always had a specific maximum in mind when they placed an ad. Any application asking for more that figure was instantly binned. Usually the only ones left were women as they tended to have lower expectations/demands.
I was replaced by two women (one less well qualified) each working for 5000GBP less than I was. God knows how they could afford to eat. Employers claim to like women employees because they're "flexible", i.e. easy to walk all over, happy to earn a second salary etc etc.
My sister teaches employment law and is a union representative in her college. Her catchphrase is: "Women are their own worst enemies".