By the way, I may have forgotten to mention that I am moving to Bengaluru (aka Bangalore), India until June 2008. I’ll be an artist-in-residence at the Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology.
Please let me know if you are in the neighborhood. All are welcome!
Mostly these are notes to myself.
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/1316.html
…. Because documents are simply points on the map, it is possible for
ThemeScape to show thousands of documents at once without overwhelming
the user. Zooming into the map reveals greater detail. For any region on
the map, a click of the mouse pops up a list of documents with related
content. Pointing to any document title displays a short text summary.
A mouse click links the user directly to the original document…..
http://www.pnl.gov/news/1995/nws95-07.htm
In Themescape, themes in the documents are layered and appear on the computer screen as a relief map of natural terrain. The mountains in Themescape indicate where themes are concentrated in the underlying documents; and their shapes — a broad butte or a high pinnacle — reflect how the thematic information is distributed and related across documents.
http://availabletechnologies.pnl.gov/technology.asp?id=129
Gabriel A. Harp
Leonardo. August 2007, Vol. 40, No. 4, Pages 376-381
Evidence from language, history and form suggest an analogy between the cinema and the genome. The author describes some of the relationships between cinema and the genome and points to opportunities for discovering unmarked categories within the genome and new methods of representation. This is accomplished by evaluating existing metaphors presented for the understanding of genetics and revealing how current scientific understanding and social concerns suggest a cinematic alternative. The formal principles of function, difference and development mediate discussion and serve as heuristics for investigating creative opportunities.
From the Leonardo website:
Forty years ago in Paris, a group of artists, scientists and engineers got together and decried the lack of professional venues where emerging work bridging the two cultures could be presented, debated and promoted. Frank Malina, himself a research engineer and a professional artist, convinced publisher Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press to take on the challenge of publishing a peer-reviewed scholarly art-science-technology journal, the first time such a project had been attempted.
To date they have published the work of more than 5,500 artists, researchers and scholars. In keeping with our networked times, the Leonardo community is collaborating with groups around the world on a variety of events.
Watch an interview with Executive Editor Roger Malina as he explains a little more about the history and activities of the Leonardo community.
Yeah, it looks good. I’m usually not one to comment on these things, but as you’ll see below it took on a personal touch. I have to admit that I am very attracted to the iPhone, and as technology goes it’s simple and portable. This weekend an Apple store opened in Ann Arbor. I just happened to pass by during the opening while looking for a new pair of glasses at the mall (I ended up sticking to contacts).
I really like the idea of being able to access the web from anywhere or even just from WiFi hotspots. That the big deal for me. I like the idea of not having to pay a cell provider for access to the web even more. The iPhone is smaller and slimmer than I had envisioned from the pictures. I was surprised at just how easy and intuitive the interface was to use. Apple’s big breakthrough, the “finger zoom” I guess you could call it, works pretty well.
I did not like the high incidence of “false positives”, that is, times when I would go to zoom or move a zoomed-in page and accidentally click on an ad or some other link (lucky for Google). This seems to suggest some rethinking of web design for these smaller devices. It’s not that anything is smaller per se, but when your pointer goes from 2 pixels to 20 (your finger), you have to make icons instead of arrows and numbers for navigation. You might also have to have parts of the page that are link-free, going against everything the New York Times stands for with its “every-word-is-hot-linked” approach. Typing is also difficult, but I suspect that, like texting, it may be possible to overcome the limitations of extra-small keys on the touchscreen.
Still, I didn’t even begin to grasp the possibility until talking with my grandmother this weekend. We’ve been trying to find a solution for her to be able to access the web and send mail. Getting her a full-fledged computer is overkill, and she’s definitely a minimalist with not intention of having a big clunking box on her antique desktop. We got to talking about her new phone and how she never uses it, in part because the many functions make it difficult to navigate and simply enter her friend’s phone number. I asked her who her provider was, and then it dawned on me: The iPhone might solve her interaction problems. Leave it to Apple to make interaction interactive (..now about that whole sustainable environment thing…Steve).
I tend to typically assume that new technology and interfaces are more difficult to use and not easier. This is usually because some marketing department has gotten too invented in the design, trying to sell features and products that nobody needs or wants. The iPhone is actually pretty simple, and the icons make doing simple things like entering a phone number easy because you can see the navigational menu structure. Calling is the same as selecting a full name. I like the idea of Grandma being able to operate her computer form a small and portable device. She’s been wanting to surf the web, and she still needs an operable phone. Perhaps the iPhone is it, but she’ll have to be the judge.
I’m still waiting for the semantically important switch from iTechnology to uTechnology, but that’s me. I wonder how these things can help us collect data in the field and otherwise do science 2.0? Then again, Naoki hacked his pda a long time ago to enter info about his flowers and their levels of inbreeding.
I came across this post (The way we present genomic and proteomic data on the web sucks, Nascent) while out searching on another task. Interesting that the life science folks are maybe just now starting to get it. I’ve been saying for years that the big issue with communicating genetics, genomics, and evolution in general has to do with HOW we present the information and data. It’s never enough to simply say that researchers need to just do the science. It’s not just scientists that are the shareholders in this project; everyone has a stake and it’s up to all of those involved to take a crack at making the science and the information more accessible, more story-like, and more engaging in general.
Here’s an example of sucks. Too bad I don’t know what to search for.
This was why we started OrganelleView. It’s not the solution, but it’s a start.
This self-scoring test is to determine a basic environmental perception of place. It was given to me while taking “Deep Ecology for the 22nd Century” with Bill Devall at Humboldt State University. It was adapted by Bill from a version that appeared in CoEvolution Magazine (now Whole Earth Review).
The boundaries of place, of bioregion, are not artificial lines drawn on a map for arbitary political purposes. The boundaries are natural boundaries such as watershed, mountain, sea coast.
This test is framed for the Humboldt Bay region in some questions and northwestern California in other questions. Scoring is done on the honor ystem, so if you fudge, cheat, or elude, you also get an idea of you’re at. The quiz is culture bound, favoring the country over the city landscape.
You can replace the proper name between the *asterisks* with your local region. Can you name your local region?
This week I am attending the ECHO (exploring and collecting history online) workshop about “Doing Digital History” hosted by the Center for New Media and History at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.
After starting out with introductions (you can see participant profiles at the ECHO site above), we surveyed a range of digital history genres from archives, exhibits, and teaching sites, to online communities and journals.
Later in the afternoon on Thursday, we looked at a very cool organizing tool for gathering online sources. Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] “is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.” It’s going to be huge for my work which often involves collecting movie citations or references that I know–but don’t have entered into Endnote.
At the end of the day we perused javascript for building behaviors into websites. It’s always great to get any expert detailing their strategies. Jeremy Boggs gave a great rundown and suggested some good books. Jeremy is writing his dissertation on the history of CSS. Nice.
Today, Friday, we’ve launched into looking into some of the available tools for doing digital history…things like blogs, timelines, archives, wikis, feeds and so on.
Now (11:04), engaging the public…
In her New York Times column, Re:framing, Denise Caruso addresses recent discoveries in human genetics as they relate to the current platform for biotechnology and gene patenting guidelines.
The article begins by stating that:
THE $73.5 billion global biotech business may soon have to grapple with a discovery that calls into question the scientific principles on which it was founded.
Over at Evolgen, many commentators debate the scientific accuracy of Caruso’s arguments. I think it’s a mistake to make the argument that the scientific accuracy of her article is what’s at stake. Caruso’s point is that there is a gap between the science, the policy, and the biotech industry’s tactics. We’ve known for awhile that genes are not discrete entities. Unfortunately, it takes a direct hit to the human psyche for people to realize that the biological world applies to them too.
I’m not out to defend Caruso, but I do share her perspective that many perspectives are needed to address these issues. In response to what I thought was a fairly limited set of responses to her article, I contributed my own comment to the Evogen blog:
I agree that it’s easy to misunderstand Caruso’s arguments, especially if one takes a linear perspective towards them. I would have definitely preferred more background on the ENCODE project, but given the nuance of the science involved, perhaps her tactic of stating that the landscape (pun intended) is more complex than public policy reflects is more appropriate for the Times.For one thing, Caruso’s argument doesn’t seem to be based at the molecular level at all. Caruso takes a population level perspective that’s needed to recognize and understand what is relevant to ownership and commodification of genetic processes. Genomics is only the vector; what she’s really talking about is capitalism.
Though it’s not clear if she is using “network effect” to refer to intragenomic interactions or intergenomic ones, her examples of bacterial resistance and malaria suggest that she’s referring to intergenomic interactions. My take on what she is reacting to is the observation that genetic interactions have many epistatic or non-linear effects while the prevalent assumption for biotech and policy-makers is that that genes are predominantly additive and that a predictable relationship exists between gene identity and outcome.
Starting with popular science is enough. The way genes are portrayed in popular culture suggests that there are genes for heart disease and genes for aggression and so on. That’s how biotech gets funded, no? By stipulating that specific genes have appreciable effects on health, the value of those genes can be measured, built, and sold as a product. This is misleading. Yes, we can associate disease variation with specific loci, but it’s is never the case that genes cause anything. Genetic material is one component of a very non-linear system that includes developmental timing and environmental interactions. As every evolutionary geneticist knows, selecting on a single trait often results in correlated responses across many other traits. Given that traits are based on the interactions of many genes, moving genes among individuals doesn’t bring the whole system along in the manner that, say, artificial selection does.
By stating that a gene has a distinct function, we are in essence naming it and categorizing it according to that function. For genes to be patented, a recognizable function has to be ascribed to them. We can say that the “terminator gene” has a protein binding function, but can’t we also say that the “terminator gene” also has a social unrest function if we expand our observations beyond the lab? Though we can’t directly establish a cause and effect relationship between large-scale social interactions and political protests and the gene, we know intuitively that the effect of of this transgene isn’t limited to corn or cotton.
It’s true that the science isn’t particularly new. What’s new is that people are starting to ask relevant questions about how the ownership and practices of industry takes into account the mechanistic possibilities for creating value as well as the relevant downstream biological and social process. This is not something that any single individual or profession can either validate or invalidate.
I’ll agree that “the economic and regulatory foundation on which the entire biotechnology industry is built” is probably a mix of a lot of different factors. But why isn’t it based on “the presumption that genes operate independently”? When was the last time you heard a company say that a disease was attributed to many genes and only in certain contexts and we’re not entirely sure how and when, but please still buy our product? People want certainty and hope, especially when their health is involved. Reducing the message down to single genes does that. All that Caruso is saying is that this may mean bigger problems down the line if we don’t actually revise our policy and language to match what we actually know about the world.
A correction to the original article at the HybridVigor blog
Make sure you check out the bio catagory at we-make-money-not-art.com
They do a nice set of interviews, reviews and other what-nots in the world of contemporary art and biology, particularly in Western Europe.
