As bioengineering becomes easier, and “people start to engineer biology,” we’ll need to worry about new issues.

Will people synthesize pathogens from scratch?

Will groups pool knowledge legally?

Will there be accreditation and oversight of those who create biological systems?

The Implications of Synthetic Biology

If you grow up in England, as I did, a few items of unquestioned wisdom are passed down to you from the preceding generation. Along with stories of a plucky island race with a glorious past and the benefits of drinking unbelievable quantities of milky tea, you will be told that England is blessed with its pleasant climate courtesy of the Gulf Stream, that huge current of warm water that flows northeast across the Atlantic from its source in the Gulf of Mexico. That the Gulf Stream is responsible for Europe's mild winters is widely known and accepted, but, as I will show, it is nothing more than the earth-science equivalent of an urban legend.

The Source of Europe's Mild Climate

Scientists want to adopt a set of declarations to improve the security of research that uses DNA synthesis. A proponent discusses the whys and wherefores of this effort.

Keeping Synthetic Biology Away from Terrorists

In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

We need similar controls for the confirmation bias in the arenas of law, business and politics. Judges and lawyers should call one another on the practice of mining data selectively to bolster an argument and warn juries about the confirmation bias. CEOs should assess critically the enthusiastic recommendations of their VPs and demand to see contradictory evidence and alternative evaluations of the same plan. Politicians need a stronger peer-review system that goes beyond the churlish opprobrium of the campaign trail, and I would love to see a political debate in which the candidates were required to make the opposite case.

Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias.

The Political Brain

This book provides a unique review of technical developments related to the unification that is rapidly taking place today among nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science (NBIC). It assesses potential for revolutionary applications of these developments and their likely impact in improving the human condition and offers a wide variety of scholarly views on the likely societal impacts and policy implications of these developments and applications, including assessments of educational, economic, commercial, legal, ethical, political, and social implications.

Managing Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno Innovations : Converging Technologies in Society

An insightful guide to understanding and navigating the ethical issues faced by anyone affected by the ethical dilemmas associated with current and emerging technologies

Ethics of Emerging Technologies provides the background, insight, and tools for approaching and solving ethical dilemmas across a broad range of topics. The text discusses ethical problems, using examples and reasoning tools that will aid engineers, scientists, managers, administrators, and the public who wish to understand risks, benefits, and possible approaches to resolving conflicts associated with new technologies in the context of the global community.

Solutions we choose to ethical dilemmas accompanying new technologies will profoundly affect future generations. Scientific facts and guides to decision-making for all associated with emerging technologies are presented. Some of the topics are:
* Human health and environmental effects of alternative energy production methods
* Communications and privacy
* Plagiarism and authorship
* Genetic modification of organisms
* Human and animal experimentation
* Synthetic biology and bioterrorism
* Confidentiality in science, engineering, and business communications
* Risks and consequences of enhancing human beings through new technologies
* Cloning of human beings and stem cell research
* Brain modifications
* Space exploration

Ethics of Emerging Technologies : Scientific Facts and Moral Challenges

An Inconvenient Truth is about Gore himself as well as global warming. It shows the man that I met in the 1980s at scientific roundtable discussions, passionate and knowledgeable, true to the message he has delivered for years. It makes one wonder whether the American public has not been deceived by the distorted images of him that have been presented by the press and television. Perhaps the country came close to having the leadership it needed to deal with a grave threat to the planet, but did not realize it.

We have reached a critical tipping point.

We have at most ten years -- not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. If we do not, climate disasters will become unavoidable.

When nations must abandon large parts of their land because of rising seas, what will our liability be? And will our children, as adults in the world, carry a burden of guilt, as Germans carried after World War II?

The Threat to the Planet

This volume is an important complement to Wasserman and Faust's Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge, 1995). The authors, leading methodologists, present the most significant developments in quantitative models and methods for analyzing social network data that appeared in the 1990s. They review recent advances in network measurement, network sampling, analysis of centrality, positional analysis or blockmodelling, analysis of diffusion through networks, analysis of affiliation or "two-mode" networks, the theory of random graphs, and dependence graphs.

Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis presents the most important developments in quantitative models and methods for analyzing social network data that have appeared during the 1990s. Intended as a complement to Wasserman and Faust's Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, it is a collection of original articles by leading methodologists reviewing recent advances in their particular areas of network methods. Reviewed are advances in network measurement, network sampling, the analysis of centrality, positional analysis or blockmodelling, the analysis of diffusion through networks, the analysis of affiliation or 'two-mode' networks, the theory of random graphs, dependence graphs, exponential families of random graphs, the analysis of longitudinal network data, graphical techniques for exploring network data, and software for the analysis of social networks.

Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis

Review
Dan Rockmore, Dartmouth College : This excellent collection of papers will provide great one-stop shopping to those working in the evolving world of network research. It may very well become a standard resource for the growing number of courses on networks now beginning to pervade curricula. Indeed, a current difficulty in teaching such a course is that there are no good texts, and a quick look around the Web reveals that almost all these courses are taught using research papers, many of which appear in this collection.
Sergei Maslov, Brookhaven National Laboratory : I read this anthology with great interest. The editors took pains to locate (and even translate) a significant number of papers predating the recent surge of interest in the science of networks, and they do a fine job of clarifying what exactly is new (and what is not so new) in the modern approach as reflected in the vast literature on the subject. The introduction to each section nicely summarizes the main findings of the featured articles.

Book Description

From the Internet to networks of friendship, disease transmission, and even terrorism, the concept--and the reality--of networks has come to pervade modern society. But what exactly is a network? What different types of networks are there? Why are they interesting, and what can they tell us? In recent years, scientists from a range of fields--including mathematics, physics, computer science, sociology, and biology--have been pursuing these questions and building a new "science of networks." This book brings together for the first time a set of seminal articles representing research from across these disciplines. It is an ideal sourcebook for the key research in this fast-growing field.

The book is organized into four sections, each preceded by an editors' introduction summarizing its contents and general theme. The first section sets the stage by discussing some of the historical antecedents of contemporary research in the area. From there the book moves to the empirical side of the science of networks before turning to the foundational modeling ideas that have been the focus of much subsequent activity. The book closes by taking the reader to the cutting edge of network science--the relationship between network structure and system dynamics. From network robustness to the spread of disease, this section offers a potpourri of topics on this rapidly expanding frontier of the new science.

The Structure and Dynamics of Networks

From cell phones to Web portals, advances in information and communications technology have thrust society into an information age that is far-reaching, fast-moving, increasingly complex, and yet essential to modern life. Now, renowned scholar and author David Luenberger has produced Information Science, a text that distills and explains the most important concepts and insights at the core of this ongoing revolution. The book represents the material used in a widely acclaimed course offered at Stanford University.

Drawing concepts from each of the constituent subfields that collectively comprise information science, Luenberger builds his book around the five "E's" of information: Entropy, Economics, Encryption, Extraction, and Emission. Each area directly impacts modern information products, services, and technology--everything from word processors to digital cash, database systems to decision making, marketing strategy to spread spectrum communication.

To study these principles is to learn how English text, music, and pictures can be compressed, how it is possible to construct a digital signature that cannot simply be copied, how beautiful photographs can be sent from distant planets with a tiny battery, how communication networks expand, and how producers of information products can make a profit under difficult market conditions.

Information Science