A bit of a rumpus about UK science funding policy erupted this week, following publication of a letter to the Times Higher about the move to increase the emphasis towards funding science with a more immediate benefit to the UK economy. This manifests itself as a two page document (the Impact Summary) that now forms part of every Research Council grant application (in addition, I think, to the short "Beneficiaries" section that already exists.

This policy seems to be favoured by the Science Minister, Paul Drayson.  Lord Drayson is a politician with a commercial science/engineering background, but who has never been elected to public office.  he was ennobled, and reaches Minister status via a seat in the House of Lords.  Interestingly, as befits a proponent of grant applicants predicting and outlining future benefits of their yet to be performed research (not just economic but social as well), he appears to claim sixth sense "I saw it coming, says minister of sixth sense Lord Drayson".

After a bit of teasing in the blogosphere that the draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome would be released in time for Charles Darwin's birthday this week, I was eagerly looking for a paper.  Instead what I find are three news articles in Science, one describing some of the outcomes of the work, and two setting it in context. Some quotes:

Initial comparisons with our own 3 billion bases indicate that a mere 1000 to 2000 amino acid differences, as well as a yet-unknown number of non-coding changes, do that job. For comparison, about 50,000 amino acid differences separate us and chimpanzees. 

While wandering round the internet during the recent flare-up of bloggers writing about recent developments in the MMR-autism conspiracy theory, I came across this neat graphic which seems to me to encapsulate some of the issues relation to causation vs coincidence (for example, see "MMR and false syllogisms" for more information).

In the meantime, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog seems down - maybe the recent upsurge in traffic has overwhelmed it.

It's been a little while since I last blogged about the vile Phorm system, in which all internet activity that is undertaken by customers of ISPs using the system is inspected and analysed for key words via which targeted adverts may be delivered.  For more information about this system, check out the excellent Dephormation.  We've seen a variety of "spinning" techniques used by both Phorm (former spyware distributors) and their principal client, BT, over the last few years, and news over the last couple of days has been typical.

Back in 2006 and 2007, BT conducted secret tests of the system, using their customers as guinea pigs, without their knowledge or consent.  This was probably illegal, and certainly an unreasonable act.  A third trial (in which users were invited to participated) was held at the end of 2008.

I am sat on the train, reading my emails using the Vodafone USB mobile broadband stick, when I get this:

Ben Goldacre's posted an update on the fracas with LBC and Jeni Barnett over their ill-advised broadcast on the topic of the MMR vaccine and autism.  In essence, while LBC's decision to threaten their legal muscle did cause Goldacre to pull the audio clip from his blog, it's now got spread over the internet, has attracted considerable celeb support, and now is the subject of an early-day motion.  Barnett's own efforts at damage-limitation appear to be restricted to deleting critical comments from her blog.  Thankfully, the power of the internet has ensured the information is still out there, and is proliferating.

Ben Goldacre's latest article very clearly explains why this is such an important issue, and why under-informed dimwits shouldn't make irresponsible broadcasts.  Perhaps LBC should keepa closer eye (or should that be "ear") on their broadcasters.

I've been looking at reports of various eBook readers over the last few years, and even read a few books on my Pocket PC.  This device, Amazon's Kindle 2, looks to being very useful for a traveller wishing to carry several books.

There's a review over at The Register (Amazon unveils Kindle 2.0), from where this image is sourced.

The Open Rights Group have reported on the Lords Constitution Committee report on surveillance and privacy.  This is a monster document, which can be read here: Constitution Committee - Second Report. Surveillance: Citizens and the State.  It's a big document, and it perhaps easier to digest via the ORG synopsis, and as the ORG say, "Those with nothing to hide can still have a great deal to fear".

The RIPA sections are interesting (Committee report section; ORG interpretation), in light of pretty clear local council abuses of RIPA ro spot fly-tippers etc.

For the last few seasons, my availability for training has declined steadily.  This, coupled with the passing years, means that each year when I start reviewing past performances for completing CTT entry forms for the coming season, I find it a little depressing.  This season is no exception.

But at least the Cycling Time Trials website back again after yet another SQL injection attack, this time using a different platform.  Hopefully this'll be more secure.  Actually, I think it would look a lot better without all the flashing, moving adverts, but perhaps that's just me being a grumpy old man (and anyway, as a Firefox user, I can always use the AdBlock plug-in).

As the UK  and international cycling season begins to swing into action, it's also the time that my blog articles on cycling will start to reappear (see also the Team Grumpy blog).

Some really quite sad news from the recently completed Tour of Qatar cycling stage race this week: one of the riders (Frederiek Nolf, of Team Topsport Vlaanderen-Mercator) died in his sleep, just five days short of his 22nd birthday.  The newsflash at cyclingnews.com (Belgian rider passes away in Qatar) was published on 5th February: the following stage was neutralised out of respect.

The BBC reports that UK measles rates continue to rise (Rise in measles 'very worrying'), in response to falling levels of MMR vaccination.  The downward trend in MMR vaccination followed Andrew Wakefield's claims that there is a link between MMR vaccination and autism. That the British public continue to believe there is a link between MMR vaccination and autism, despite the many investigations that have disproved it is really very sad.

Ben Goldacre has written extensively on the culpability of the media in propagating the scare stories that have resulted in this appalling situation.  Recently he blogged about a highly irresponsible LCB  radio broadcast in which Jeni Barnett continued to push distorted and inaccurate information on the supposed dangers of vaccination. Today he reports that LCB have launched lawyers at him, on the grounds that his posting mp3 recordings of that segment of the radio show breaches copyright (he promptly removed the link from his website).  Too late, I fear, the recording has begun to proliferate on the internet (see Streisand Effect).  Now, it's made it to Wikileaks, so I guess it's out there to stay.  And I hear that transcripts are being prepared for release.

A paper in the current issue of Nature [Love et al (2009) Nature 457; 718-722] suggests that multicellular life existed about 100 million years before the explosion of bilaterian animals in the Cambrian. The evidence comes from analysis of rocks from the Arabian peninsula, in which geologically preserved derivatives of characteristic chemicals have been detected. Now, this paper interested me because of its message concerning the dating of the origins of multicellular life; I am not a geologist or a chemist, so many of the details escape me.

Identification of the presence of soft bodied animal in the fossil record is always difficult: it's generally the hard parts of the animal that are preserved by fossilisation (there are exceptions). The Cambrian explosion (see timeline diagram- click on it to link to the interactive Wikipedia diagram) resulted in a wide variety of animal forms: what's less clear is from where this abundance of diverse forms arose. This paper takes chemical approach to establishing the presence of animal remains in rock samples.

For those of us who've been following ill-fated and badly led software company SCO's ill-judged crusade against Linux (see Groklaw for a full history), The Register has an amusing story (SCO boss to customers: 'Blah. Blah. Blah') - pointing out that SCO's website features a rather bizarre message from Company President Jeff Hunsaker.

Just in case SCO wake up to this cockup, those cheeky chaps at El Reg have saved a copy.

The BBC has announced that it's no longer using the US-based company Omniture to track the browsing habits of visitors to its website (see earlier blog post - BBC gifting private data to a USA-based company).  Well, at least for UK based visitors - those in the rest of the world will still be tracked.

Source - nodpi.org forum posting

Quite a few of the bloggers at ScienceBlogs have been writing about an exciting new fossil find: a newly discovered fossil ancestor of whales.  The exciting thing here is that the fossil contains the remains of foetal whales.  Here's the University of Michigan podcast.

The fossil confirms that Maiacetus inuus was amphibious, or at least gave birth on land, as the foetus is oriented to emerge head-first (clearly not adaptive for aquatic birth, and something not seen in present-day cetaceans).

The Register has published an update to yet another legal action against Google, this time in Italy - "Google on trial over Italian 'defamation' vid".  Some background:

In September 2006, someone posted a three-minute cell-phone video to Google's Italian website in which four Turin teenagers make fun of a classmate with Down's Syndrome. And in July, after two years of investigation, Italian authorities filed criminal charges against four Google execs: chief legal officer David Drummond, chief privacy officer Peter Fleischer, an unnamed London-based video exec, and chief financial officer George Reyes, who has since left the company.

What's interesting is that within a day of a complaint about this video reaching YouTube, the viseo was taken down.  So where does the responsibility here lie?  I suggest the perpetrators of the bullying, and those who posted the video are the villains of the piece, not Google executives or YouTube operatives.

Been a bit busy over at Wonderful Life, and at work this week to maintain the accelerating pace of blogging.  Here's an amusing little website animation for your amusement.  Thanks to the excellent PZMyers for the headsup.

According to the Daily Telegraph, a team of scientists (we're always "teams") have cloned an extinct Spanish mountain goat from DNA contained in frozen skin samples from the last known specimen, aand using domestic goat eggs.

The article, Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning,saysthat

A recurring theme in this blog is not just that the Government seems determined to trample over the data protection rights of the UK population, but that they are singularly inept at ensuring that the state machinery treats various data sources in a careful and secure manner.

From databases left on trains, to stolen laptops contaning databases of personal data, I (and I guess many others) view Wacky Jacqui's upcoming Uber-database that will be made possible by a combination of databases (including the vile IMP comms database and that of the ridiculous ID card scheme) using the "interesting" clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill Part 8 - Data Protection Act 1998 (c. 29).  This empowers Ministers to direct the linkage of diferent databases.

Just as I finish reading (or rather, re-reading) chapters concerning the fate of Easter Island (Rapanui) and of Henderson and Pitcairn Islands in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond, the 23rd January issue of Science arrives, bearing two articles on the spread of humans (Austronesians) from Taiwan and onwards across Micronesia to Polynesia.  One of these papers, by Gray and colleagues, presents a linguistic analysis of langauages across this region.  The second, by Moodley et al looks at the variation of the human pathogen Helicobacter pylori in these same peoples.  Both strands of evidence documenting this population spread are in striking agreement.

I have no experience in the kind of linguistic analysis carried out by Gray and colleagues, so my understanding is informed by Colin Renfrew's Perspectives article in this issue of Science.There are over 1000 polynesian languages, making it one of the largest language families.  Ultimately, the populations that eventually colonised even the most remote islands such as Easter were ultimately derived from a migration that can (at least in one theory) be traced back to origins in Taiwan (upper panel in the figure below).  Other possibilities include origins in island Southeast Asia.  Genetic evidence (such as that provided by mitochondrial DNA sequences) has been ahrd to interpret, and may not support the Taiwan origin of the Austronesian speaking people.  On the other hand, such evidence may be complicated by post-colonial gene flow.