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Building Inspectors Adelaide

Reliable Adelaide Building Inspector - 2 views

I always wanted to have a house of my own. I have been eyeing a property for sale nearby which is really nice. I am planning to buy the property, but, I also wanted to make sure that the price matc...

Building Inspectors Adelaide

started by Building Inspectors Adelaide on 04 Oct 11 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

IBM to Apply Analytics to War on Terror - 1 views

Big Blue will supply its analytics know-how to a key U.S. military force in the battle against terrorism October 13, 2009 By Stephen Baker TECHNOLOGY Can the analytic science that powers operati...

War Technology Business

started by Weiye Loh on 14 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

TODAYonline | Commentary | Trust us, we're academics ... or should you? - 0 views

www.todayonline.com/...re-academics-,,,-or-should-you

Academic Capitalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer, published by research firm StrategyOne, which surveyed 5,075 "informed publics" in 23 countries on their trust in business, government, institutions and individuals. One of the questions asked of respondents was: "If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible would that information be?". Of the eight groups of individuals - academic/expert, technical expert in company, financial/industry analyst, CEO, non-governmental organisation representative, government official, person like myself, and regular employee - academic/expert came out tops with a score of 70 per cent, followed by technical expert at 64 per cent.
  • the film on the global financial crisis Inside Job, which won the 2011 Academy Award for best documentary. One of the documentary's themes is the role a number of renowned academics, particularly academic economists, played in the global crisis. It highlighted potentially serious conflicts of interests related to significant compensation derived by these academics serving on boards of financial services firms and advising such firms.
  • Often, these academics also played key roles in shaping government policies relating to deregulation - most appear allergic to regulation of the financial services industry. The documentary argued that these academics from Ivy League universities had basically become advocates for financial services firms, which blinded them to firms' excesses. It noted that few academic economists saw the financial crisis coming, and suggested this might be because they were too busy making money from the industry.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It is difficult to say if the "failure" of the academics was due to an unstinting belief in free markets or conflicts of interest. Parts of the movie did appear to be trying too hard to prove the point. However, the threat posed by academics earning consulting fees that dwarf their academic compensation, and which might therefore impair their independence, is a real one.
  • One of the worst was the Ivy League university economics professor engaged by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to co-author a report on the Icelandic financial system. He concluded that the system was sound even though there were numerous warning signs. When he was asked how he arrived at his conclusions, he said he had talked to people and were misled by them. One wonders how much of his conclusions were actually based on rigorous analysis.
  • it is troubling if academics merely become mouthpieces for vested interests. The impression one gets from watching the movie certainly does not fit with the high level of trust in academics shown by the Edelman Trust Barometer.
  • As an academic, I have often been told that I can be independent and objective - that I should have no axe to grind and no wheels to grease. However, I worry about an erosion of trust in academics. This may be especially true in certain disciplines like business (which is mine, incidentally).
  • too many business school professors were serving on US corporate boards and have lost their willingness to be critical about unethical business practices. In corporate scandals such as Enron and Satyam, academics from top business schools have not particularly covered themselves in glory.
  • It is more and more common for universities - in the US and here - to invite business people to serve on their boards.
  • universities and academics may lose their independence and objectivity in commenting on business issues critically, for fear of offending those who ultimately have an oversight role over the varsity's senior management.
  • Universities might also have business leaders serving on boards as potential donors, which would also confuse the role of board members and lead to conflicts of interest. In the Satyam scandal in India, the founder of Satyam sat on the board of the Indian School of Business, while the Dean of the Indian School of Business sat on Satyam's board. Satyam also made a significant donation to the Indian School of Business.
  • Universities are increasingly dependent on funding from industry and wealthy individuals as well as other sources, sometimes even dubious ones. The recent scandal at the London School of Economics involving its affiliation with Libya is an example.
  • It is important for universities to have robust gift policies as part of the risk management to protect their reputation, which can be easily tainted if a donation comes from a questionable source. It is especially important that donations do not cause universities to be captured by vested interests.
  • From time to time, people in industry ask me if I have been pressured by the university to tone down on my outspokenness on corporate governance issues. Thankfully, while there have been instances where varsity colleagues and friends in industry have conveyed messages from others to "tone down", I have felt relatively free to express my views. Of course, were I trying to earn more money from external consulting, I guess I would be less vocal.
  • I do worry about the loss of independence and, therefore, trust in academics and academic institutions if we are not careful about it.
Weiye Loh

Do peer reviewers get worse with experience? Plus a poll « Retraction Watch - 0 views

retractionwatch.wordpress.com/...wers-get-worse-with-experience

Peer Review Academic Research Academic Journal

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • We’re not here to defend peer review against its many critics. We have the same feelings about it that Churchill did about democracy, aka the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Of course, a good number of the retractions we write about are due to misconduct, and it’s not clear how peer review, no matter how good, would detect out-and-out fraud.
  • With that in mind, a paper published last week in the Annals of Emergency Medicine caught our eye. Over 14 years, 84 editors at the journal rated close to 15,000 reviews by about 1,500 reviewers. Highlights of their findings: …92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision), at rates unrelated to the length of their service (but moderately correlated with their mean quality score, with better-than average reviewers decreasing at about half the rate of those below average). Only 8% improved, and those by very small amount.
  • The average reviewer in our study would have taken 12.5 years to reach this threshold; only 3% of reviewers whose quality decreased would have reached it in less than 5 years, and even the worst would take 3.2 years. Another 35% of all reviewers would reach the threshold in 5 to 10 years, 28% in 10 to 15 years, 12% in 15 to 20 years, and 22% in 20 years or more. So the decline was slow. Still, the results, note the authors, were surprising: Such a negative overall trend is contrary to most editors’ and reviewers’ intuitive expectations and beliefs about reviewer skills and the benefits of experience.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What could account for this decline? The study’s authors say it might be the same sort of decline you generally see as people get older. This is well-documented in doctors, so why shouldn’t it be true of doctors — and others — who peer review?
  • Other than the well-documented cognitive decline of humans as they age, there are other important possible causes of deterioration of performance that may play a role among scientific reviewers. Examples include premature closure of decisionmaking, less compliance with formal structural review requirements, and decay of knowledge base with time (ie, with aging more of the original knowledge base acquired in training becomes out of date). Most peer reviewers say their reviews have changed with experience, becoming shorter and focusing more on methods and larger issues; only 25% think they have improved.
  • Decreased cognitive performance capability may not be the only or even chief explanation. Competing career activities and loss of motivation as tasks become too familiar may contribute as well, by decreasing the time and effort spent on the task. Some research has concluded that the decreased productivity of scientists as they age is due not to different attributes or access to resources but to “investment motivation.” This is another way of saying that competition for the reviewer’s time (which is usually uncompensated) increases with seniority, as they develop (more enticing) opportunities for additional peer review, research, administrative, and leadership responsibilities and rewards. However, from the standpoint of editors and authors (or patients), whether the cause of the decrease is decreasing intrinsic cognitive ability or diminished motivation and effort does not matter. The result is the same: a less rigorous review by which to judge articles
  • What can be done? The authors recommend “deliberate practice,” which involves assessing one’s skills, accurately identifying areas of relative weakness, performing specific exercises designed to improve and extend those weaker skills, and investing high levels of concentration and hundreds or thousands of hours in the process. A key component of deliberate practice is immediate feedback on one’s performance. There’s a problem: But acting on prompt feedback (to guide deliberate practice) would be almost impossible for peer reviewers, who typically get no feedback (and qualitative research reveals this is one of their chief complaints).
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11
     
    92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision), at rates unrelated to the length of their service (but moderately corre
Weiye Loh

Harvard professor spots Web search bias - Business - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

Google Search SEO SMO Race Racism Crime

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Sweeney said she has no idea why Google searches seem to single out black-sounding names. There could be myriad issues at play, some associated with the software, some with the people searching Google. For example, the more often searchers click on a particular ad, the more frequently it is displayed subsequently. “Since we don’t know the reason for it,” she said, “it’s hard to say what you need to do.”
  • But Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, an online trade publication that tracks the Internet search and advertising business, said Sweeney’s research has stirred a tempest in a teapot. “It looks like this fairly isolated thing that involves one advertiser.” He also said that the results could be caused by black Google users clicking on those ads as much as white users. “It could be that black people themselves could be causing the stuff that causes the negative copy to be selected more,” said Sullivan. “If most of the searches for black names are done by black people . . . is that racially biased?”
  • On the other hand, Sullivan said Sweeney has uncovered a problem with online searching — the casual display of information that might put someone in a bad light. Rather than focusing on potential instances of racism, he said, search services such as Google might want to put more restrictions on displaying negative information about anyone, black or white.
test and tagging

Be Safe With [e]Safe - 1 views

The welfare of my employees is my number one priority so that I can ensure that they will work productively. That is why when I established my company, I made sure that the equipment to be used are...

test and tagging

started by test and tagging on 15 Dec 11 no follow-up yet
qiyi liao

Amazon targeted in class action over vanishing e-books - 0 views

www.ecommercetimes.com/...67742.html

privacy breach rights disclosure misinformation

shared by qiyi liao on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • qiyi liao on 19 Aug 09
     
    Issue in contention: Amazon deleted legally purchased e-books from Kindle users without prior notice, after learning that these e-books were pirated versions. This ability of Amazon's to "remotely delete digital content purchased through the Kindle store" was never disclosed to its paying customers. In fact, its license terms seem to offer Kindle users permanent access to the files they purchase (see #). Sure, Amazon admits mishandling the issue and promises never to remove content in such circumstances again. However, ultimately, they still own that power to remove, edit content etc. What effects would that have on our society then? Consider Orwell's notion of Big Brother in "1984" (Creepily, one of the books that was removed in this mini-scandal). Also, who is/should Amazon be more accountable to? Its customers? Shareholders? Third-party publishers? (At the end of the day, it's still a profit-seeking corporation.) NB. Kindle is a platform developed by Amazon for reading e-books and other digital media. #Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.
Meenatchi

Top Internet Threats: Censorship to Warrantless Surveillance - 4 views

Article Summary: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/wireds-top-inte/ The article talks about several Internet threats comprising government surveillance and the loss of users' privacy throu...

Surveillance privacy DPI behavioral advertising

started by Meenatchi on 08 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Privacy in Singapore - 9 views

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN002553.pdf There is no general data protection or privacy law in Singapore. The government has been aggressive in using surveill...

Singapore Privacy Electronic Road Pricing Surveillance

started by Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 09
Chen Guo Lim

POLICE & THIEF - 5 views

According to the readings, one reason why people do not consider illegal downloads as theft is that it does not deprive others of that item. When I download an mp3 file from, the file will not disa...

started by Magdaleine on 26 Aug 09 1 follow-up, last by Chen Guo Lim on 26 Aug 09
Weiye Loh

When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...udgments-masquerade-as-science

Economics Science Bias

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Most people think of the term in the context of production of goods and services: more efficient means more valuable output is wrung from a given bundle of real resources (which is good) or that fewer real resources are burned up to produce a given output (which is also good).
  • In economics, efficiency is also used to evaluate alternative distributions of an available set of goods and services among members of society. In this context, I distinguished in last week’s post between changes in public policies (reallocations of economic welfare) that make some people feel better off and none feel worse off and those that make some people feel better off but others feel worse off.
  • consider whether economists should ever become advocates for a revaluation of China’s currency, the renminbi — or, alternatively, for imposing higher tariffs on Chinese imports. Such a policy would tend to improve the lot of shareholders and employees of manufacturers competing with Chinese imports. Yet it would make American consumers of Chinese goods worse off. If the renminbi were significantly and artificially undervalued against the United States dollar, relative to a free-market exchange rate without government intervention, that would be tantamount to China running a giant, perennial sale on Chinese goods sold to the United States. If you’re an American consumer, what’s not to like about that? So why are so many economists advocating an end to this sale?
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Strict constructionists argue that their analyses should confine themselves strictly to positive (that is, descriptive) analysis: identify who wins and who loses from a public policy, and how much, but leave judgments about the social merits of the policy to politicians.
  • a researcher’s political ideology or vested interest in a particular theory can still enter even ostensibly descriptive analysis by the data set chosen for the research; the mathematical transformations of raw data and the exclusion of so-called outlier data; the specific form of the mathematical equations posited for estimation; the estimation method used; the number of retrials in estimation to get what strikes the researcher as “plausible” results, and the manner in which final research findings are presented. This is so even among natural scientists discussing global warming. As the late medical journalist Victor Cohn once quoted a scientist, “I would not have seen it if I did not believe it.”
  • anyone who sincerely believes that seemingly scientific, positive research in the sciences — especially the social sciences — is invariably free of the researcher’s own predilections is a Panglossian optimist.
  • majority of economists have been unhappy for more than a century with the limits that the strict constructionist school would place upon their professional purview. They routinely do enter the forum in which public policy is debated
  • The problem with welfare analysis is not so much that ethical dimensions typically enter into it, but that economists pretend that is not so. They do so by justifying their normative dicta with appeal to the seemly scientific but actually value-laden concept of efficiency.
  • economics is not a science that only describes, measures, explains and predicts human interests, values and policies — it also evaluates, promotes, endorses or rejects them. The predicament of economics and all other social sciences consists in their failure to acknowledge honestly their value orientation in their pathetic and inauthentic pretension to emulate the natural sciences they presume to be value free.
  • By the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, a public policy is judged to enhance economic efficiency and overall social welfare — and therefore is to be recommended by economists to decision-makers — if those who gain from the policy could potentially bribe those who lose from it into accepting it and still be better off (Kaldor), or those who lose from it were unable to bribe the gainers into forgoing the policy (Hicks). That the bribe was not paid merely underscores the point.
  • In applications, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion and the efficiency criterion amount to the same thing. When Jack gains $10 and Jill loses $5, social gains increase by $5, so the policy is a good one. When Jack gains $10 and Jill loses $15, there is a deadweight loss of $5, so the policy is bad. Evidently, on the Kaldor-Hicks criterion one need not know who Jack and Jill are, nor anything about their economic circumstances. Furthermore, a truly stunning implication of the criterion is that if a public policy takes $X away from one citizen and gives it to another, and nothing else changes, then such a policy is welfare neutral. Would any non-economist buy that proposition?
  • Virtually all modern textbooks in economics base their treatment of efficiency on Kaldor-Hicks, usually without acknowledging the ethical dimensions of the concept. I use these texts in my economics courses as, I suppose, do most my colleagues around the world. But I explicitly alert my students to the ethical pitfalls in normative welfare economics, with commentaries such as “How Economists Bastardized Benthamite Utilitarianism” and “The Welfare Economics of Health Insurance,” or with assignments that force students to think about this issue. My advice to students and readers is: When you hear us economists wax eloquent on the virtue of greater efficiency — beware!
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Aug 10
     
    When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science
Weiye Loh

The Problem with Climate Change | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=9079

Climate Science AGW Carbon Tax Political Economy Neoliberalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • what is climate change? From a scientific point of view, it is simply a statistical change in atmospheric variables (temperature, precipitation, humidity etc). It has been occurring ever since the Earth came into existence, far before humans even set foot on the planet: our climate has been fluctuating between warm periods and ice ages, with further variations within. In fact, we are living in a warm interglacial period in the middle of an ice age.
  • Global warming has often been portrayed in apocalyptic tones, whether from the mouth of the media or environmental groups: the daily news tell of natural disasters happening at a frightening pace, of crop failures due to strange weather, of mass extinctions and coral die-outs. When the devastating tsunami struck Southeast Asia years ago, some said it was the wrath of God against human mistreatment of the environment; when hurricane Katrina dealt out a catastrophe, others said it was because of (America’s) failure to deal with climate change. Science gives the figures and trends, and people take these to extremes.
  • One immediate problem with blaming climate change for every weather-related disaster or phenomenon is that it reduces humans’ responsibility of mitigating or preventing it. If natural disasters are already, as their name suggests, natural, adding the tag ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ emphasizes the dominance of natural forces, and our inability to do anything about it. Surely, humans cannot undo climate change? Even at Cancun, amid the carbon cuts that have been promised, questions are being brought up on whether they are sufficient to reverse our actions and ‘save’ the planet.  Yet the talk about this remote, omnipotent force known as climate change obscures the fact that, we can, and have always been, thinking of ways to reduce the impact of natural hazards. Forecasting, building better infrastructure and coordinating more efficient responses – all these are far more desirable to wading in woe. For example, we will do better at preventing floods in Singapore at tackling the problems rather than singing in praise of God.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • However, a greater concern lies in the notion of climate change itself. Climate change is in essence one kind of nature-society relationship, in which humans influence the climate through greenhouse gas (particularly CO2) emissions, and the climate strikes back by heating up and going crazy at times. This can be further simplified into a battle between humans and CO2: reducing CO2 guards against climate change, and increasing it aggravates the consequences. This view is anchored in scientists’ recommendation that a ‘safe’ level of CO2 should be at 350 parts per million (ppm) instead of the current 390. Already, the need to reduce CO2 is understood, as is evident in the push for greener fuels, more efficient means of production, the proliferation of ‘green’ products and companies, and most recently, the Cancun talks.
  • So can there be anything wrong with reducing CO2? No, there isn’t, but singling out CO2 as the culprit of climate change or of the environmental problems we face prevents us from looking within. What do I mean? The enemy, CO2, is an ‘other’, an externality produced by our economic systems but never an inherent component of the systems. Thus, we can declare war on the gas or on climate change without taking a step back and questioning: is there anything wrong with the way we develop?  Take Singapore for example: the government pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 16% under ‘business as usual’ standards, which says nothing about how ‘business’ is going to be changed other than having less carbon emissions (in fact, it is questionable even that CO2 levels will decrease, as ‘business as usual’ standards project a steady increase emission of CO2 each year). With the development of green technologies, decrease in carbon emissions will mainly be brought about by increased energy efficiency and switch to alternative fuels (including the insidious nuclear energy).
  • Thus, the way we develop will hardly be changed. Nobody questions whether our neoliberal system of development, which relies heavily on consumption to drive economies, needs to be looked into. We assume that it is the right way to develop, and only tweak it for the amount of externalities produced. Whether or not we should be measuring development by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or if welfare is correlated to the amount of goods and services consumed is never considered. Even the UN-REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) scheme which aims to pay forest-rich countries for protecting their forests, ends up putting a price tag on them. The environment is being subsumed under the economy, when it should be that the economy is re-looked to take the environment into consideration.
  • when the world is celebrating after having held at bay the dangerous greenhouse gas, why would anyone bother rethinking about the economy? Yet we should, simply because there are alternative nature-society relationships and discourses about nature that are more or of equal importance as global warming. Annie Leonard’s informative videos on The Story of Stuff and specific products like electronics, bottled water and cosmetics shed light on the dangers of our ‘throw-away culture’ on the planet and poorer countries. What if the enemy was instead consumerism? Doing so would force countries (especially richer ones) to fundamentally question the nature of development, instead of just applying a quick technological fix. This is so much more difficult (and less economically viable), alongside other issues like environmental injustices – e.g. pollution or dumping of waste by Trans-National Corporations in poorer countries and removal of indigenous land rights. It is no wonder that we choose to disregard internal problems and focus instead on an external enemy; when CO2 is the culprit, the solution is too simple and detached from the communities that are affected by changes in their environment.
  • We need hence to allow for a greater politics of the environment. What I am proposing is not to diminish our action to reduce carbon emissions, for I do believe that it is part of the environmental problem that we are facing. What instead should be done is to reduce our fixation on CO2 as the main or only driver of climate change, and of climate change as the most pertinent nature-society issue we are facing. We should understand that there are many other ways of thinking about the environment; ‘developing’ countries, for example, tend to have a closer relationship with their environment – it is not something ‘out there’ but constantly interacted with for food, water, regulating services and cultural value. Their views and the impact of the socio-economic forces (often from TNCs and multi-lateral organizations like IMF) that shape the environment must also be taken into account, as do alternative meanings of sustainable development. Thus, even as we pat ourselves on the back for having achieved something significant at Cancun, our action should not and must not end there. Even if climate change hogs the headlines now, we must embrace more plurality in environmental discourse, for nature is not and never so simple as climate change alone. And hopefully sometime in the future, alongside a multi-lateral conference on climate change, the world can have one which rethinks the meaning of development.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Dec 10
     
    Chen Jinwen
Weiye Loh

Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists - microbiology, genomics, genetics, evolution, cell biology, cancer, astrobiology - Australian Life Scientist - 0 views

www.lifescientist.com.au/..._years_ago_say_astrobiologists

Cancer Evolution Life

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • astrobiologists, working with oncologists in the US, have suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago.
  • Read more about what this discovery means for cancer research.
  • The genes that controlled the behaviour of these early multicellular organisms still reside within our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check.It's when these newer controlling genes fail that the older mechanisms take over, and the cell reverts to its earlier behaviours and grows out of control.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The new theory, published in the journal Physical Biology, has been put forward by two leading figures in the world of cosmology and astrobiology: Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University; and Charles Lineweaver, from the Australian National University.
  • According to Lineweaver, this suggests that cancer is an atavism, or an evolutionary throwback.
  • In the paper, they suggest that a close look at cancer shows similarities with early forms of multicellular life.
  • “Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when humans were nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells. “We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said.
  • One piece of evidence to support this theory is that cancers appear in virtually all metazoans, with the notable exception of the bizarre naked mole rat."This quasi-ubiquity suggests that the mechanisms of cancer are deep-rooted in evolutionary history, a conjecture that receives support from both paleontology and genetics," they write.
  • the genes that controlled this early multi-cellular form of life are like a computer operating system's 'safe mode', and when there are failures or mutations in the more recent genes that manage the way cells specialise and interact to form the complex life of today, then the earlier level of programming takes over.
  • Their notion is in contrast to a prevailing theory that cancer cells are 'rogue' cells that evolve rapidly within the body, overcoming the normal slew of cellular defences.
  • However, Davies and Lineweaver point out that cancer cells are highly cooperative with each other, if competing with the host's cells. This suggests a pre-existing complexity that is reminiscent of early multicellular life.
  • cancers' manifold survival mechanisms are predictable, and unlikely to emerge spontaneously through evolution within each individual in such a consistent way.
  • The good news is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.Instead, because cancers fall back on the same evolved mechanisms that were used by early life, we can expect them to remain predictable, thus if they're susceptible to treatment, it's unlikely they'll evolve new ways to get around it.
  • If the atavism hypothesis is correct, there are new reasons for optimism," they write.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11
     
    Feature: Inside DNA vaccines bioMD makes a bid for Andrew Forest's Allied Medical and Coridon Alexion acquires technology for MoCD therapy More > Most Popular Media Releases Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists Feature: The challenge of a herpes simplex vaccine Feature: Proteomics power of pawpaw bioMD makes a bid for Andrew Forest's Allied Medical and Coridon Immune system boosting hormone might lead to HIV cure Biotechnology Directory Company Profile Check out this company's profile and more in the Biotechnology Directory! Biotechnology Directory Find company by name Find company by category Latest Jobs Senior Software Developer / Java Analyst Programm App Support Developer - Java / J2ee Solutions Consultant - VIC Technical Writer Product Manager (Fisheye/Crucible)   BUYING GUIDES Portable Multimedia Players Digital Cameras Digital Video Cameras LATEST PRODUCTS HTC Wildfire S Android phone (preview) Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH2 digital camera HTC Desire S Android phone (preview) Qld ICT minister Robert Schwarten retires Movie piracy costs Aus economy $1.37 billion in 12 months: AFACT Wireless smartphones essential to e-health: CSIRO Aussie outsourcing CRM budgets to soar in 2011: Ovum Federal government to evaluate education revolution targets Business continuity planning - more than just disaster recovery Proving the value of IT - Part one 5 open source security projects to watch In-memory computing Information security in 2011 EFA shoots down 'unproductive' AFACT movie piracy study In Pictures: IBM hosts Galactic dinner Emerson Network Power launches new infrastructure solutions Consumers not smart enough for smartphones? Google one-ups Apple online media subscription service M2M offerings expand as more machines go online India cancels satellite spectrum deal after controversy Lenovo profit rises in Q3 on strong PC sales in China Taiwan firm to supply touch sensors to Samsung HP regains top position in India's PC market Copyright 20
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: A Science Assessment as an Honest Broker of Policy Options - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...ment-as-honest-brokers-of.html

Policy Science Politics Climate Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The authors explain: [R]ather than investigating consequences of specific policies indentified (sic) by a governing body, most previous assessments were constructed around scenarios devised by scientists
  • The alternative approach that they recommend has three components: (i) The governing body of IPBES, the plenary, should ask for assessment of consequences of specific policies and programs at well defined geographical scales. (ii) Projections of changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services should take the form of conditional predictions of the consequences of these policies and programs. And (iii), capacity-building efforts should enhance skills needed for policy-oriented assessment within IPBES and should catalyze external funding for underpinning science and science-based policy development.
  • An approach to assessment focused on identifying and even evaluating policy options will not be without its difficulties.  However, it also has great promise to deliver far more policy relevant information to decision makers than has been the case in other international assessments. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  •  The lead author explains: Discussions between decision makers and scientists should start with the question 'what do governments want and what options do they have?' Knowing the likely consequences of alternative policy options is critical to choosing the best strategy.
Weiye Loh

Report: Piracy a "global pricing problem" with only one solution - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...lem-with-only-one-solution.ars

Piracy Pricing Capitalism Globalization Income Inequality

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Over the last three years, 35 researchers contributed to the Media Piracy Project, released last week by the Social Science Research Council. Their mission was to examine media piracy in emerging economies, which account for most of the world's population, and to find out just how and why piracy operates in places like Russia, Mexico, and India.
  • Their conclusion is not that citizens of such piratical societies are somehow morally deficient or opposed to paying for content. Instead, they write that “high prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous.”
  • When legitimate CDs, DVDs, and computer software are five to ten times higher (relative to local incomes) than they are in the US and Europe, simply ratcheting up copyright enforcement won't do enough to fix the problem. In the view of the report's authors, the only real solution is the creation of local companies that “actively compete on price and services for local customers” as they sell movies, music, and more.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Some markets have local firms that compete on price to offer legitimate content (think the US, which has companies like Hulu, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft that compete to offer legal video content). But the authors conclude that, in most of the world, legitimate copyrighted goods are only distributed by huge multinational corporations whose dominant goals are not to service a large part of local markets but to “protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits.”
  • This might increase profits globally, but it has led to disaster in many developing economies, where piracy may run north of 90 percent. Given access to cheap digital tools, but charged terrific amounts of money for legitimate versions of content, users choose piracy.
  • In Russia, for instance, researchers noted that legal versions of the film The Dark Knight went for $15. That price, akin to what a US buyer would pay, might sound reasonable until you realize that Russians make less money in a year than US workers. As a percentage of their wages, that $15 price is actually equivalent to a US consumer dropping $75 on the film. Pirate versions can be had for one-third the price.
  • Simple crackdowns on pirate behavior won't work in the absence of pricing and other reforms, say the report's authors (who also note that even "developed" economies routinely pirate TV shows and movies that are not made legally available to them for days, weeks, or months after they originally appear elsewhere).
  • The "strong moralization of the debate” makes it difficult to discuss issues beyond enforcement, however, and the authors slam the content companies for lacking any credible "endgame" to their constant requests for more civil and police powers in the War on Piracy.
  • piracy is a “signal of unmet consumer demand.
  • Our studies raise concerns that it may be a long time before such accommodations to reality reach the international policy arena. Hardline enforcement positions may be futile at stemming the tide of piracy, but the United States bears few of the costs of such efforts, and US companies reap most of the modest benefits. This is a recipe for continued US pressure on developing countries, very possibly long after media business models in the United States and other high-income countries have changed.
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 11
     
    A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can't be stopped through "three strikes" Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That's because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is "better described as a global pricing problem." And the only way to solve it is by changing the price.
Weiye Loh

'Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data on the Web - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3358504575544381288117888.html

Data Marketing Social Marketing Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its "Mood" discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves. It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was "scraping," or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe's private online forums.
  • PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online "buzz" for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.
  • The market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of "scraping." Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives. The emerging business of web scraping provides some of the raw material for a rapidly expanding data economy. Marketers spent $7.8 billion on online and offline data in 2009, according to the New York management consulting firm Winterberry Group LLC. Spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Wall Street Journal's examination of scraping—a trade that involves personal information as well as many other types of data—is part of the newspaper's investigation into the business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.
  • Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites. Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics.
  • One such service is offered by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. Dow Jones collects data from the Web—which may include personal information contained in news articles and blog postings—that help corporate clients monitor how they are portrayed. It says it doesn't gather information from password-protected parts of sites.
  • The competition for data is fierce. PatientsLikeMe also sells data about its users. PatientsLikeMe says the data it sells is anonymized, no names attached.
  • Nielsen spokesman Matt Anchin says the company's reports to its clients include publicly available information gleaned from the Internet, "so if someone decides to share personally identifiable information, it could be included."
  • Internet users often have little recourse if personally identifiable data is scraped: There is no national law requiring data companies to let people remove or change information about themselves, though some firms let users remove their profiles under certain circumstances.
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11
     
    he market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of "scraping." Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.
Weiye Loh

Have you heard of the Koch Brothers? | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=10234

News media bias Protest Violence Union

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • I return to the Guardian online site expressly to search for those elusive articles on Wisconsin. The main page has none. I click on News – US, and there are none. I click on ‘Commentary is Free’- US, and find one article on protests in Ohio. I go to the New York Times online site. Earlier, on my phone, I had seen one article at the bottom of the main page on Wisconsin. By the time I managed to get on my computer to find it again however, the NYT main page was quite devoid of any articles on the protests at all. I am stumped; clearly, I have to reconfigure my daily news sources and reading diet.
  • It is not that the media is not covering the protests in Wisconsin at all – but effective media coverage in the US at least, in my view, is as much about volume as it is about substantive coverage. That week, more prime-time slots and the bulk of the US national attention were given to Charlie Sheen and his crazy antics (whatever they were about, I am still not too sure) than to Libya and the rest of the Middle East, or more significantly, to a pertinent domestic issue, the teacher protests  - not just in Wisconsin but also in other cities in the north-eastern part of the US.
  • In the March 2nd episode of The Colbert Report, it was shown that the Fox News coverage of the Wisconsin protests had re-used footage from more violent protests in California (the palm trees in the background gave Fox News away). Bill O’Reilly at Fox News had apparently issued an apology – but how many viewers who had seen the footage and believed it to be on-the-ground footage of Wisconsin would have followed-up on the report and the apology? And anyway, why portray the teacher protests as violent?
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In this New York Times’ article, “Teachers Wonder, Why the scorn?“, the writer notes the often scathing comments from counter-demonstrators – “Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.” What had begun as an ostensibly ‘economic reform’ targeted at teachers’ unions has gradually transmogrified into a kind of “character attack” to this section of American society – teachers are people who wage violent protests (thanks to borrowed footage from the West Coast) and they are undeserving of their economic benefits, and indeed treat these privileges as ‘rights’. The ‘war’ is waged on multiple fronts, economic, political, social, psychological even — or at least one gets this sort of picture from reading these articles.
  • as Singaporeans with a uniquely Singaporean work ethic, we may perceive functioning ‘trade unions’ as those institutions in the so-called “West” where they amass lots of membership, then hold the government ‘hostage’ in order to negotiate higher wages and benefits. Think of trade unions in the Singaporean context, and I think of SIA pilots. And of LKY’s various firm and stern comments on those issues. Think of trade unions and I think of strikes in France, in South Korea, when I was younger, and of my mum saying, “How irresponsible!” before flipping the TV channel.
  • The reason why I think the teachers’ protests should not be seen solely as an issue about trade-unions, and evaluated myopically and naively in terms of whether trade unions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is because the protests feature in a larger political context with the billionaire Koch brothers at the helm, financing and directing much of what has transpired in recent weeks. Or at least according to certain articles which I present here.
  • In this NYT article entitled “Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute“, the writer noted that Koch Industries had been “one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.” Further, the president of Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group financed by the Koch brothers, had reportedly addressed counter-demonstrators last Saturday saying that “the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.” and in his own words -“ ‘We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation’ ”. All this rhetoric would be more convincing to me if they weren’t funded by the same two billionaires who financially enabled Walker’s governorship.
  • I now refer you to a long piece by Jane Mayer for The New Yorker titled, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama“. According to her, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.”
  • Their libertarian modus operandi involves great expenses in lobbying, in political contributions and in setting up think tanks. From 2006-2010, Koch Industries have led energy companies in political contributions; “[i]n the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation.” More statistics, or at least those of the non-anonymous donation records, can be found on page 5 of Mayer’s piece.
  • Naturally, the Democrats also have their billionaire donors, most notably in the form of George Soros. Mayer writes that he has made ‘generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s.” Yet what distinguishes him from the Koch brothers here is, as Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued, ‘that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” ‘ Of course, this must be taken with a healthy dose of salt, but I will note here that in Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job, which was about the 2008 financial crisis, George Soros was one of those interviewed who was not portrayed negatively. (My review of it is here.)
  • Of the Koch brothers’ political investments, what interested me more was the US’ “first libertarian thinktank”, the Cato Institute. Mayer writes, ‘When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told [Mayer] that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.” ‘
  • K Street refers to a major street in Washington, D.C. where major think tanks, lobbyists and advocacy groups are located.
  • with recent developments as the Citizens United case where corporations are now ‘persons’ and have no caps in political contributions, the Koch brothers are ever better-positioned to take down their perceived big, bad government and carry out their ideological agenda as sketched in Mayer’s piece
  • with much important news around the world jostling for our attention – earthquake in Japan, Middle East revolutions – the passing of an anti-union bill (which finally happened today, for better or for worse) in an American state is unlikely to make a headline able to compete with natural disasters and revolutions. Then, to quote Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during that prank call conversation, “Sooner or later the media stops finding it [the teacher protests] interesting.”
  • What remains more puzzling for me is why the American public seems to buy into the Koch-funded libertarian rhetoric. Mayer writes, ‘ “Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.” I suppose that not knowing who is funding the political rhetoric makes it easier for the public to imbibe it.
Weiye Loh

Why You Can't Say "Twitter" Or "Facebook" On French TV - 0 views

mashable.com/...acebook-mentions-banned-france

New Media Traditional Media Facebook Twitter Social Media Advertising Cultural Industries

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The regulatory decree was issued on May 27. The rationale behind the decision? Apparently mentioning social networks like Twitter or Facebook by name goes against a 1992 decree prohibiting surreptitious advertising. Encouraging users to engage with the content creators or give their own feedback is “clandestine advertising” for the social networks themselves.
  • Christine Kelly, a spokesperson for the CSA, tried to explain the decision by saying it “would be a distortion of competition” to “give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition.”
  • Matthew Fraser, a Canadian-born journalist who lives and works in Paris, sees this ruling as an example of the “deeply rooted animosity in the French psyche toward Anglo-Saxon cultural domination.” Fraser writes that “sometimes this cultural resentment finds expression in French regulations and laws.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mashable always give misleading news with misleading titles and ridiculous analysis. In France, you cannot do neither good nor bad ad for any brand or company in a TV program (unless you pay your ad slot of course). With the coming of social networks, people advertise their page and by the way facebook and twitter. That’s why the ban comes to say that facebook and twitter are also brands and companies like others. Actually, you can say “Facebook” and “twitter” and whatever you want… in any TV program in France, but you cannot advertise for them. So please be less simplistic and a little more percise in you articles.
  • By this logic no personal brand (i.e. Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and so on) could be mentioned without them paying for it. And by this logic, public relations could not exist as a profession in France.
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Jun 11
     
    French broadcasters who want to encourage viewer interaction via Facebook or Twitter accounts can no longer do so. The "follow us on Twitter" or "Like us on Facebook" refrains - common parlance in American broadcasting - are no longer allowed on French channels. The networks can still say "find us on social networks," but services cannot be mentioned by name.
Weiye Loh

Google's in-house philosopher: Technologists need a "moral operating system" | VentureBeat - 0 views

venturebeat.com/...orowitz-moral-operating-system

Technology Philosophy Ethics Google

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 May 11 - No Cached
  • technology-makers aren’t supposed to think about the morality of their products — they just build stuff and let other people worry about the ethics. But Horowitz pointed to the Manhattan Project, where physicists developed the nuclear bomb, as an obvious example where technologists should have thought carefully about the moral dimensions of their work. To put it another way, he argued that technology makers should be thinking as much about their “moral operating system” as their mobile operating system.
  • most of the evil in the world comes not from bad intentions, but rather from “not thinking.”
  • “Ethics is hard,” Horowitz said. “Ethics requires thinking.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • try to articulate how they decided what was right and wrong. “That’s the first step towards taking responsibility towards what we should do with all of our power,” Horowitz said, later adding, “We have so much power today. It is up to us to figure out what to do.”
  • Weiye Loh on 20 May 11
     
    To illustrate how ethics are getting short-shrift in the tech world, Horowitz asked attendees whether they prefer the iPhone or Android. (When the majority voted for the iPhone, he joked that they were "suckers" who just chose the prettier device.) Then he asked whether it was a good idea to take data from an audience member's phone in order to provide various (and mostly beneficial) services, or whether he should be left alone, and the majority of audience voted to leave him alone. Finally, Horowitz wanted to know whether audience members would use the ideas proposed by John Stuart Mill or by Immanuel Kant to make that decision. Not surprisingly, barely anyone knew what he was talking about. "That's a terrifying result," Horowitz said. "We have stronger opinions about our handheld devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions."
Weiye Loh

Apple causes 'religious' reaction in brains of fans, say neuroscientists - 0 views

www.digitaltrends.com/...ns-of-fans-say-neuroscientists

Brand Apple Religion

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 May 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 19 May 11
     
    Secrets of the Superbrands also looks at the likes of Facebook, which has enjoyed phenomenal success in just a few years. "Like Apple, mobile phones and social networks offer an opportunity for us to express our basic human need to communicate. And it's by tapping into our basic needs, like gossip, religion or sex that these brands are taking over our world at such lightning speed," Riley says. He concludes: "That's not to say that clever marketing and brilliant technical innovation aren't also crucial, but it seems that if you're not providing a service which is of potential interest to every one of the 6.9 billion human beings on the planet, the chances are you're never going to become a technology superbrand."
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