Exinction Risks Underestimated -- NATURE

A new article in Nature argues that current models for estimating extinction risks underestimate the impact of forces beyond birth-death ratio and environment. As a result, biologists may be missing potentially significant extinction threats.

From the Nature summary:

Creation Care: Evangelicals Embrace Environmentalism

The Sundance Channel aired an interesting new documentary last night called "The Great Warming". What's interesting about it is that it examines how people are coping with forecasts and realities of global warming around the world - in London, in Bangladesh, etc. It's not about polar bears dying off or the Earth in pain... it's about real people suffering and being scared out of their wits. Powerful stuff.

Suburbia During the Crash

Maybe it's the rain in New York today, but I'm gloomy. So while China collapses, it looks like the mobility-land use solution embodied in many of America's newer suburbs seems to be unravelling due to high oil prices.

The IHT reports:

The China Slowdown

The World Bank's East Asia and Pacific blog has a good update on the most recent China quarterly forecast. The Bank's official forecast for 2008 China GDP growth is now 9.8 percent, a full 2 points below 2007 growth. Elsewhere, we've been hearing about high fuel prices and the cheap dollar putting the squeeze on Chinese manufacturing export platforms.

Cease-and-desist letter sent to California-based personalized genetics startups

California likes to think of itself as a high-tech friendly place, and generally it is. However, Alexis Madrigal reports that the state government has decided to go after personal genetics companies:

Last Monday, the state's laboratory field services group issued 13 cease-and-desist letters to genetic testing companies. Wired.com obtained a copy of the letters (pdf.) from two recipients. And the tough talk in a recent teleconference among regulatory officials confirms the seriousness of the department's intent.

"We [are] no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California," Karen Nickles, Chief of Laboratory Field Services at the health department, told members of the Clinical Laboratories Advisory Committee on June 13.

Targeted companies include personal genomics startups 23andMe and Navigenics. These services are seen as the leading edge of a new type of health care in which consumers can use their genetic profile to tailor their medical and lifestyle choices. The established medical community, however, is wary of the technology arguing that the medical utility of some tests is unproven. Doctors also complain that direct-to-consumer services bypass them as the gatekeepers and analysts of medical information, which they worry could confuse consumers, not to mention cost them a billing event.

The health department's actions are a direct challenge to the viability of the infant DNA-testing industry, for which physician involvement is shaping up to be a major battleground. As far back as a September 2006 meeting, health department officials were voicing concerns over "nutrigenetic tests that analyze a limited number of genes to give personalized nutritional and lifestyle recommendations."

(via Virginia Postrel's Dynamist Blog)

Pentagon moving into social science

The New York Times reports on a new Pentagon program to make more systematic use of social scientists.

Eager to embrace eggheads and ideas, the Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative — named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) — to the government’s effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.

Although the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, systematic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. Minerva is the first systematic effort in this area since the Vietnam War, said Thomas G. Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning, whose office will be overseeing the project.

But if the uncustomary push to engage the nation’s evolutionary psychologists, demographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists in security research — as well as the prospect of new financial support in lean times — has generated excitement among some scholars, it has also aroused opposition from others, who worry that the Defense Department and the academy are getting too cozy.

$50 million will be routed through the National Science Foundation, in an effort to make the program feel more familiar-- to reduce anxiety among researchers about working with the military, and increase the scholarly rigor.

Kid Rock: iTunes rips off artists

The BBC reports that Kid Rock believes iTunes doesn't pay enough to the artists, and has resisted offering his tracks through the service. (However, note that later in the article it says his latest single is available through iTunes in the UK.)

The most interesting part of this whole issue is Kid Rock's comments on filesharing:

Tech devices to rescue

My credit card was stolen from bag, and thankfully  I was able to report the theft and do quick damage control because I had internet connectivity and international calling on my iphone to report the theft and disable the card. The person who stole my credit card had gone on a shopping spree buying stuff worth thousands of dollars within a span of few hours.  As I was out in the field when I discovered the theft, I used the Internet on my iphone to find the number to report the theft and used the roaming facility on my phone to make the call to the bank in the US.

iPhone and citizen science

Alexis Madrigal throws a link to the X2 Project in his post on the addition of GPS in the iPhone:

With Steve Jobs' announcement that the iPhone 3G will have geolocation built-in, plenty of people are excited about finding good restaurants near them or worried about the privacy implications....

Read more >

Tracking Mobile Swarms to Change the Way We See Cities

Last fall, I reported on Alberto Barabasi's research using mobile phones to track large-scale human mobility patterns after seeing him give a paper on the topic in Budapest. That paper has now been published in Nature, and there is a public summary in Nature News.

Abundant mobility and hacks

I am in India conducting research, and as always amazed by the variety of cell phones and hacks that are available. One of our research partners brought my attention to the fact that many people in India have unlocked iphones, and have jail-breaked their iphones to install 'non-Apple" applications. A popular application is twinkle -- a twitter client that includes location based service. Twinkle is very popular with iphone users in India, who use it to twitter. It does not require sending a SMS for twittering. Iphone has not been officially launched in India as yet. It is expected to arrive later this year. But that is certainly not a deterrent for tech savvy Indians who aspire to own the iphones.

Get Ready for the Carbon Neutral Factories

MAS Holdings claims to have built the world's first carbon-neutral garment factory in Sri Lanka. The plant will make underwear for Marks & Spencer in the UK (they also make sexy lingerie for US-based Victoria's Secret).

While the plant cost 25% more to build than a traditional design (it would have been 15% without some frills due to being a showcase), with rising fuel prices it's expected to pay for the difference in less than five years.

Get ready for the carbon-neutral plants to pop up faster than garment factories after a Pearl River Delta rain.

"Walking" in Second Life

A Japanese team of researchers, led by Keio University biosciences and informatics professor Junichi Ushiba, has created a system that allows a paralyzed man to "walk" in Second Life.
Wired reports,

Researchers at Japan's Keio University have created an experimental headset designed to monitor brain waves that allowed a man who had been paralyzed for more than 30 years to control a Second Life avatar using only his thoughts.

Read more >

Massively Multi-Sensor Earthquake Detection

After discovering a free application that let her Mac laptop display movement like a seismograph, seismologist Elizabeth Cochran of UC Riverside was struck by a pretty good idea: let's turn our laptops into real earthquake sensors.

Guerilla Media Wars

In 2006, we published a Ten Year Forecast perspective called "Dark Mobs". Among other things, that piece argued that repeated top-down efforts to squelch file sharing actually created powerful incentives that drove the technology towards more distributed, secure architecture. The media giants, by killing Napster and Gnutella created the need for something as difficult to control as BitTorrent.