Over my many years at Salon — in my role as the geekiest of our editorial management team — I found myself often being asked whether some particular problem we were having with our site or our email system or something else might be the result of “hackers.”

Most of the time, I spared my inquisitors the lecture on the history and proper use of that term. Except in a tiny number of cases where there was specific evidence suggesting at least the possibility of some sort of foul play, I’d simply remind everyone how many different things could go wrong on any digital network, argue that the odds favored the likelihood of some sort of malfunction rather than malfeasance, and suggest that everyone should relax (except for our sysadmins, of course, who were busy trying to diagnose the problem).

The author of Dreaming In Code comments on John Schwartz's recent NYT article.

I note in passing that an EE Times article in 2004, Experts worry that synthetic biology may spawn biohackers, didn't generate the same kind of reaction.

Nothing to fear but complexity itself

NYT offers a brief overview of "biofabs" and synthetic biology.

Genetic engineers generally extract a gene from an organism. Then they might modify it or put it in a different organism. The gene for insulin, for instance, can be extracted from human cells and put into bacteria, which will produce insulin for use by diabetics. It is a cut-and-paste operation, like writing a phrase by snipping the necessary words out of magazines and gluing them together in the proper order.

Gene synthesis, by contrast, is like typing the phrase on a word processor. Scientists specify the sequence of the desired gene and have it “printed” at the foundry. They can do this because the complete genome sequences of humans and many other species are available in databases.

A new opportunity for foundries could come from synthetic biology, which involves designing cells almost from scratch to perform specific tasks, like producing biofuel. Synthetic biologists envision writing the DNA code for such cells the way computer programmers write software. Then the DNA would be manufactured and put into cells.

“The danger is not just bioterror,” ETC said in a report earlier this year, “but ‘bioerror.’"

On the subject of bioterror, see Keeping Synthetic Biology Away from Terrorists, from Technology Review last year, as well as my post about Drew Endy from a few months ago.

How Do You Like Your Genes?

David Beckett, a former academic who is now a principal software engineer at Yahoo, said: “Web to me means that it doesn’t come from one place. It’s distributed, but you can connect it up.” Yahoo’s data, he added, was collected from many sources, and many parts tend to work independently in their own “silos.”

Kathleen Hondru, a vice president for marketing at Innovative Systems in Pittsburgh, calls the company's process “data quality management.”

From the article linked above:

Kathleen Hondru says business is up thanks to government regulations that require industries to track massive amounts of data.

(I noticed that the author of the NYT article, Peter Wayner, in a March 2007 article for InfoWorld, also quotes Hondru and describes her company's product.)

Helping Computers to Search With Nuance, Like Us

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result.

They call it a "dollar auction."

The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.

The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.

Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player's total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to "irrationally" accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral.

Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment.

We might also call it the war in Iraq.

Lessons on the surge from economics 101

Douglas Hofstadter reviews Pinker's latest book, The Stuff of Thought.

Pinker would like language to be as precise a guide to the mind's machinery as the behavior of particles in force fields is a guide to the laws of physics. He sees linguistic regularities abounding, and he tries using them to penetrate the hidden "language of thought," whose most critical ingredients are "ethereal notions of space, time, causation, possession, and goals." Although I'm less sanguine than Pinker about language's regularity -- and, indeed, about the existence of a "language of thought" -- I find his thesis well worth contemplating.

I find it odd that the author of "How the Mind Works" never cites the authors of "The Way We Think."

For those of you in the DC area:

On Monday, 17 September, at 7 P.M. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker presents a lecture, "How Everyday Words Reveal Who We Are," drawn from his new book, as part of the Smithsonian Associates Program being held at the National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave. NW. Admission is $25 for nonmembers; call 202-633-3030 or visit http://www.smithsonianassociates.org to RSVP.

Hofstadter reads Pinker

Andrew Odlyzko's latest is a short rant on DRM. Consider it in light of the recent Rick Rubin profile, The Music Man in the NYT Magazine.

The fundamental issue that limits current use and future prospects of DRM is that, in the words of [10],

The important thing is to maximize the value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection.

DRM all too often gets in the way of maximizing the value of intellectual property.

People are very frequently willing to pay more for flat rate plans than they are for metered ones, even if their usage does not change. The trend towards flat rate plans is not universal, and there is likely to be a spectrum of charging schemes. Flat rate plans are likely to dominate for inexpensive and frequently purchased goods and services, and extreme examples of differential pricing are likely to prevail for expensive and seldom-purchased things, see [4] for a discussion and evidence.

But overall, we should expect to see growth in flat rate pricing and bundling (as in subscriptions to magazines, or in a collection of cable channels for a single price). In addition to a willingness to pay more for flat rate plans, people tend to use more of a good or service that does not involve fine-scale charging or decision making. Typical increases in usage are from 50% to 200% when users are switched from metered to flat rates. Depending on whether one wishes to increase or decrease usage, this may or may not be desirable, but in the case of information goods, the overwhelming incentive is to increase usage. This provides yet another incentive to avoid fine-grained pricing and control that DRM is often designed for.

What we are likely to end up with is a huge universe of free material, much of it of little interest to all but a handful of people.

DRM: Desirable, inevitable, and almost irrelevant

A cynical observer might dismiss the PicoCricket Kit as “Mindstorms meets Martha Stewart”—a mere repackaging of the programmable brick idea with cuddlier accessories. But that would miss the point. Silverman argues that the Mindstorms kits, and most other Lego kits, are configured largely to allow customers to build the specific models shown on the boxes. PicoCricket, on the other hand, is about giving kids a chance to build objects out of their imaginations, then program them with interesting behaviors. One example suggested on the activity cards that come with the kit: a cardboard cat equipped with a light sensor that triggers a meowing sound when the user strokes the cat’s back.

“Lego doesn’t see themselves as a brick company; they see themselves as a model company, in that the units they sell are the models, rather than the elements,” Silverman says. “We are more of an elements company. We’re not even really trying to teach kids about programming —— it’s about allowing them to use their imaginations.”

PicoCricket, Out to Prove Computer Toys Aren’t Just for Boys

A respected scholar and USC law professor reveals her journey through the horrors and demons of mental illness. She has schizophrenia.

Elyn Saks has written a memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, about which Publishers Weekly wrote:

In this engrossing memoir, Saks, a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Southern California, demonstrates a novelist's skill of creating character, dialogue and suspense. From her extraordinary perspective as both expert and sufferer (diagnosis: Chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation; prognosis: Grave), Saks carries the reader from the early little quirks to the full blown falling apart, flying apart, exploding psychosis. Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog, as Saks shows, becoming imperceptibly thicker as time goes on.

This is heavy reading, but Saks's account will certainly stand out in its field.

Kirkus sums up its book review thusly:

Worthy, but often a snooze.

A secret life of madness

In this video letter to the editor, Charles Ferguson, director of the acclaimed documentary No End in Sight, responds to Paul Bremer's September 6 op-ed, How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army.

If you haven't seen No End in Sight, I recommend it. Here's a sampler of review blurbs:

...a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.

...the best and saddest film of the year so far...

Someone in the film notes that there were 500 ways to mess things up in Iraq and that the U.S. seems intent on going through them all. After watching No End in Sight, the inescapable conclusion is that that prediction is depressingly, but exactly right.

Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups.

Charles Ferguson, On the Dismantling of the Iraqi Army

When I'm in bed the last thing I want to do is strain my eyes ...

"The last thing I want to do is cause a panic."

The last thing I want is to come across as a serious, stuffy bore.

Mostly, men urinate while we hear intriguing snippets of conversations ("I'm not a prude, but the last thing I want... ")

Obviously, I write this in the hope that none of them read this article -- the last thing I want to be doing is going and upsetting them and giving them any reason to want to get even with me!

The last thing I want is for you to feel uncomfortable with having to make policy decisions while "assholes" practice their First Amendment and speak out against the decisions you are allowing to be made or the flawed speeches lined with rhetoric you are allowing to go unchallenged at the expense of the lives of our American soldiers who will come home as veterans and live pitiful lives on the streets or in VA hospitals until they die.

The last thing I want to see is Hutu and Tutsi justifying themselves to continue to kill one another.

Wallowing is the last thing I want to do, but -- and you are going to have a hard time believing this -- the real problem is I have not been able to find anyone else willing to do it for me.

The last thing I want to do when I sit down at the end of the day is watch something with me in it.

But the last thing I want to say about this is it's not shocking that -- first of all, I think Senator Obama is entitled to express his view.

"Americans of all ages need to take a step back and re-evaluate the image they are trying to portray with their clothing. That being said, the last thing we need are more laws and ordinances."

"I leave for work really early and get home quite late and the last thing I want to be doing is splitting ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]