So, what's the point of having scientific advisors if you plain ignore what they tell you? A group of scientists have written to The Guardian urging the House of Lords to look at scientific evidence and hold off from reclassifying cannabis from C to B. (Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog has featured media misrepresentation of cannabis)
The Register reports that the Home Secretary ignored her advisors, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), and proposes re-classifying the drug.
This interesting paper investigates whether there is a relationship between polyandry and selfish genetic elements, in the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura.
Polyandry - where females have multiple mating partners - is widespread in animals, but despite its frequency, little is known of the costs and benefits of this reproductive strategy (though this paper cites evidence that the costs of multiple mating appear to outweigh the benefits. It is likely that the benefits lie in that polyandry gives the female a greater degree of control over paternity, via sperm competition. There is also a possibility that selfish genetic elements may promote polyandry by correlating male fitness with sperm competition.
The BBC has this report on an interesting marine biology discovery, relevant to explaining trace fossils. Unfortunately it's a bit vague (exemplified by its title - 'Grape' is key to fossil puzzle), and doesn't have a link to the original research paper in Current Biology. Personally, I think it looks less like a grape and more like a truffle. The picture to the left shows a cleaned up example - the real things roll around the sea floor covered in mud.
Greg Laden's Blog - Giant Gromia (amoebas) may account for ancient sea floor tracks presents a rather more coherent account of the paper, and includes a citation. Unfortunately my university doesn't have an online subscription to Current Biology. Rats! Rats!
The latest publication from our project investigating a Drosophila homologue of WRN exonuclease is now online.
Ivan Boubriak, Penelope A. Mason, David J. Clancy, Joel Dockray, Robert D. C. Saunders, Lynne S. Cox (2008). DmWRNexo is a 3′–5′ exonuclease: phenotypic and biochemical characterization of mutants of the Drosophila orthologue of human WRN exonuclease Biogerontology DOI: 10.1007/s10522-008-9181-3
This is my third posting on my upgrade experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' (see Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' upgrades and Ubuntu 8.10 'Intrepid Ibex' update. In the second of those postings, I reported that an attempt to project from my laptop borked all my nice Compiz desktop effects.
This morning I made one last ditch attempt to resolve this before reinstalling 8.10 - and succeeded. This was in part due to advice in this thread at ubuntuforums.org.
BT's major PR blunder of deleting all reference to the vile Phorm/Webwise system from its broadband support fora continues to whizz through the internet as the Streisand effect builds.
The Register weighs in - "BT silences customers over Phorm":
The Register reports that Wacky Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, is pushing ahead with plans to implement one of the biggest (if not the biggest) intrusions into the privacy of the UK population.
This batty "anti-terrorism" measure seeks to monitor all communications, including telephone, mobile phone, internet and email. The claim is that content of communications will not be recorded, merely the details of who is communicating with whom. But don't forget the tendency of function creep.
New Humanist magazine has published some amusing "cut out and keep" trading cards (God Trumps), each focussing on religions (oh, and atheists and agnostics). I particularly like the Scientologist card, especially as I am just re-reading Russell Miller's excellent 1987 biography of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. I also rather like the agnostic card!
Well, it turns out BT have decided to censor their broadband fora and remove all traces of discussion about the vile Phorm/webwise system by which they planned to spy on all their customers' internet habits. Their somewhat pathetic announcement can be read here.
There have been several threads to which all messages concerning Phorm/Webwise have been consigned. Messages elsewhere concerning Phorm/Webwise get edited to remove such references.
Well, of the three machines upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 that I blogged about the other week, I've been mostly using the Sony Vaio notebook. Some issues have come to light (some good, some bad):
The new Network Manager (see the previous post for getting it to work) is brilliant, it's so easy to switch between wireless networks, and between wired, wireless and 3G networking. It's a joy after previous versions. So, definitely a huge improvement over 8.04.
More details of the European OLPC G1G1 offer now released. Seems as though transactions will be in sterling, and via amazon.co.uk.
For full details of the OLPC laptop, and the background to its development, see the official page.
Well, it seems I was premature in my triumph at escaping the clutches of BT as my broadband provider. Having switched from BT to Zen on the 10th October, I was surprised to see a credit card charge coming through from BT Openworld dated 14th October.
I rummaged about on the BT web pages for an appropriate phone number, and found it spectacularly byzantine. Or possibly labyrinthine.
BBC News has a story that the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) will be available in Europe on a Give 1 Get 1 basis via Amazon.
I've written about the OLPC project before - this is the project started by Nicholas Negroponte to develop a low-cost laptop for educational purposes, aiming to produce the devices for $100. Last I heard, they'd got the cost down to $189. The OPLC runs Sugar Linux (I have Sugar running under VirtualBox, and it's a neat and innovative OS), and has a number of innovative technologies, notably in the low power screen which is usable in sunlight, and the dustproof and waterproof keyboard.
One week on, and I've got to grips a bit more with the iPod Touch.
Some recent developments regarding the obnoxious Phorm:
The Telco 2.0 conference feature discussions from the CEO of a web marketing company. Because the meeting was held under Chatham House rules, individuals and companies could not be named. However, it's a reasonable assumption this was someone from Phorm. The Register reports.
Here in the UK, there has been a pretty large storm about BT's trials (and proposed implementation) of the obnoxious Phorm system in which all users' web browsing sessions are intercepted and data extracted in order to deliver targeted advertising. A No 10 petition has collected a large number of signatories, and several websites have been set up to explain the problems associated with Phorm and to campaign against it. See isphormlegal for example.
Over in the USA, a company called NebuAd have been playing the same game. Working with several ISPs, they have been playing fast and loose with customer rights. Now it seems the chickens may be coming home to roost. Ars Technica reports that a class action has been launched against NebuAd and its ISP collaborators. As Ars Technica reports:
Reports broke yesterday on fora (such as nodpi) and The Register that a PlusNet customer had received an invitation to join BT Webwise. Plusnet is an ISP acquired by BT in 2006, but run as a separate business. The current trials of the vile Phorm system of data snooping began on BT customers 30th September and were supposed to last for 30 days. There had been much speculation that these trials either had not started, that they were late starting, and that BT were having trouble finding the desired naive users to sign up.
So, what's a PlusNet customer doing receiving an invitation to BT Webwise? What kind of botched system is in place here, and can we actually trust BT to manage the hardware and software that Phorm have placed in their system?
Ars Technica reports that objections to the Australian Government's internet filtering plans are growing, with ISPs joining the clamour. Discontent is fuelled by the lack of appropriate opt-out (as I posted previously). Apparently they have begun testing the system in Tasmania. presumably they think Tasmania is sufficiently backwater that objections will be ignored (a bit like the Tories treated Scotland when plotting the now discredited poll tax bac in the 1980s).
One of the anti-Phorm gang has set up a concise web page outlining the objections many have to the BT-Phorm data snooping system. What's particularly useful is that every assertion has a citation supporting it. Read it and weep over what has become of British Telecom. [update: apologies, I botched the link, now corrected]
