The Network of Global Corporate Control, as revealed by a research group at ETH Zurich (kind of the Swiss MIT). Their core finding: a densely connected “super entity” of 147 corporations, about 75% of which are financial intermediaries, has an amount of control which is ~10 times as great as their economic scale would suggest. They are all majority owned by by other members of the super entity, and so have co-incident interests, and are likely to act as a bloc to protect themselves and each other, and to be subject to simultaneous group failure when under duress. Not like this is a huge surprise or anything, but it’s nice to see it described in a quantitative framework.
Tag: plos
Leveraging digital design in synthetic biology
Automatic Design of Digital Synthetic Gene Circuits from PLoS Computational Biology. They seem to be saying look, real biology isn’t generally digital, and all that continuum behavior means we need a bunch of new and complex tools to do anything with it.  However, there are plenty of instances of pseudo-digital biological control systems, and we’ve already got a gigantic toolbox from EE/VLSI world for building very complex digital circuits, so why not limit ourselves to using an artificially digitized subset of biology so we can leverage the existing design tools, and see how far we get? Weird to think of this particular kind of very intimate digitization of life. Talk about historical effects. What would our post-dark-age descendants think, rediscovering a strange class of metabolic networks, in which everything is binary?
Shared Links for Apr 30th
- Transparency means nothing without justice – Government transparency is necessary, but not sufficient. If police violence is recorded and publicized, and nobody cares, it doesn't matter. This is in come sense emblematic of the coup in western propaganda. You don't need to control the media as the Soviets did or the Chinese do, if your population is comfortable enough not to care what's happening out there to someone else, and if their voting patterns are firmly tied to other issues (especially social issues like abortion), the idea of a democratic revolt becomes fairly abstract. I think this where a lot of the government's fear of economic recessions comes from. When people are out of work, or even hungry, suddenly they become a lot more excitable. (tagged: transparency law police politics technology internet )
- Condensing steam without water – Concentrating solar thermal power stations are ultimately designed to run a steam turbine, just like a gas-fired power plant. That means they need water (to turn into steam). Problematically, most such plants use water as a condensing coolant (70% of Caltech's water usage is as coolant for our 14MW worth of gas-fired power)… which is going to be hard to come by in the desert, where CSP will be built. Thankfully, there's a way to recondense steam without using a water coolant – but it does require a huge cooling tower. Not so great in Pasadena, but probably fine in the Mojave, next to acres and acres of mirrors. (tagged: solar energy technology sustainability green electricity water )
- Rousing a Latent Defense Mechanism to Fight HIV – It turns out there is a gene in humans that produces a protein which inhibits infection by HIV, but it has a mutation – a premature stop codon – which prevents it from being effectively synthesized. This mutation doesn't exist in most Old World monkeys (and that's apparently why they can't get HIV). Undoing the mutation allows the protein to be synthesized, and grants HIV immunity to human cells. I imagine that undoing bad mutations like this, and our inability to synthesize vitamin C, might be the first place we see human germ-line engineering outside of disease avoidance (preventing e.g. cystic fibrosis). Really, these mutations are hard to distinguish from genetic diseases – they're just diseases that we, as a species, have learned to live with. (tagged: genetic engineering hiv aids biology science research plos medicine )
- Anna in the Middle East – Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who got a Fulbright fellowship to live in the West Bank in 2005, and document the experiences of Palestinians. She's been giving presentations about it ever since. Some parts of her presentation are available via YouTube too. From the 15 minutes I watched she seemed like a level headed critic. She's speaking in Boulder and Denver in May. (tagged: israel palestine politics fulbright peace war )
- Twitter + Stimulus = Humans are Gullible – A wonderful demonstration of the power of the confirmatory bias. Twitter is the perfect platform for the injection of random falsehoods. Too short for citations. Instantaneous distribution. Make sure your followers are predisposed to agree with what you say, and you can get them to believe just about anything – within that constraint. Too bad the author seems to think this only applies to conservatives. (tagged: politics twitter statistics propaganda )
Shared Links for Feb 12th
- Astronaut's Video Satirizes NASA Bureaucracy – I'm impressed that NASA actually let this satire out, and forced a bunch of managers to watch it… not sure if they're actually capable of fixing themselves though. We can hope. (tagged: nasa bureaucracy youtube satire astronaut npr )
- Sexting Teens May Face Child Porn Charges – Can it really be kiddie porn if you took the photo yourself, and you're a (horny) minor? Seriously. This country is totally nuts. Maybe we should ban mirrors in teen bedrooms too. (tagged: sex technology porn sexting texting sms mms phone )
- H.R. 801 That Conyers bill again! – A roundup of responses to John Conyers' H.R. 801: "The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act", which would (despite it's ridiculous name) prevent the public from accessing the fruits of the research which they funded in the first place. We should be expanding NIH style open access requirements, not rolling them back (tagged: hr801 conyers PLoS open access copyright publishing science policy )
- Congress is trying to restrict public access to publicly funded research – Under pressure from publishers, Congress is considering outlawing open access requirements like the ones that NIH imposes on its grantees, meaning that the fruits of publicly funded research will not be publicly available. We should be expanding open access requirements across all public research funding agencies, not rolling back what little we've got. Write your rep! (tagged: copyright PLoS publishing open access NIH PubMed HR801 research science policy )
- Reports of Vélib’s Demise Greatly Exaggerated – How can one really ensure that public-private "partnerships" like the Velib program don't end up being subject to this kind of PR BS? Or alternatively, how can one ensure that such a program is efficiently and effectively administered purely by the public sector? (tagged: bicycle velib transportation pr cycling paris )
Congress seeks to ban open access requirements
A bill duplicitously entitled the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” (HR 6845) has been introduced in congress with the goal of prohibiting federal science funding agencies such as the NIH, NSF, NASA, etc. from making their grants contingent upon open access to the published results. Currently, a large proportion of federally funded biomedical research comes with a requirement that the results be listed in the Open Access PubMed database. Proponents of Open Access journals have seen this policy as an example of the way things should work – publicly funded research should have publicly accessible results – but now this system, and progress in that direction, is in jeopardy. HR 6845 would prohibit any federal funding agency from making their funds contingent on public access to the results.
The bill has been referred to the House judicial committee. Our representative, Adam Schiff, is on the committee. If you support open access to scientific publications – especially publicly funded scientific research, please contact him and tell him to oppose the bill. Senator Feinstein is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and should also be contacted.
More information including background on the NIH open access policy can be found at the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. You can track the bill’s progress at OpenCongress.org. If you do call, write, fax, or e-mail your representative or senator, please e-mail Jennifer McLennan (jennifer [at] arl [dot] org) and let her know.
Who cares about guns?
Amy’s Salon is meeting tonight, talking about the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold the 2nd amendment in Washington, D.C. I did a bit of reading on the subject, and (regrettably) I agree with Scalia:
“Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”