I was never much for twitter, but I finally signed up for friendfeed, because it seems like everyone’s got their twitters and blogs and bookmarking fed into there, and commenting on the friendfeed works just as well. I’ve been meaning to switch from Plaxo given their somewhat shady tactics, but I did like their activity aggregation, so I made do with simply not giving them access to my contacts. However, now that Comcast has bought them, it was time to find another service, and friendfeed looked like just the thing. It was easy to hook up my various sites to my feed(a little too easy – since they only require a username), and immediately was able to find the same crowd of people from Nature Network and SciLink, due to the handy recommendation feature. Once I subscribed to Attila and Deepak, the recommendation feature brought up Neil and Pedro and JC Bradley and the whole rest of the early-adopter lot.

Hi Guys!

Mr. Gunn’s friendfeed

Steve Murphy has asked the DNA Network, of which I’m a member, to put out the word about the webcast on Wednesday. The title is “How Genomic Medicine Is Changing the Management of Breast & Ovarian Cancer” and the link is here. Tune in around 1 PM EDT to hear a panel of experts discuss such questions as:

What should a doctor and patient do when a patient tests positive?
What is the risk in taking a “wait and see” approach?
Are there alternatives to radical surgery?
What are potential tort issues in predictive genetic testing and medical uses of
genetic tests?

They’ve picked up on my futurist snark. I really do like futurists, I promise.

Lately I’ve been hearing comments about things like declining research competitiveness, bright young Indians choosing to stay in India instead of come to the U.S. to seek their fortune, and comments about how even the research that is being done in American universities is increasingly being done by foreign students. Some international talent(which presumably has scores of advisors helping with these decisions) is even choosing to be paid in euros instead of dollars. The troubling thing about this is that instead of these comments coming from the more rabble-rousing section of the web, they’re coming from intelligent, well-read people with a worldly perspective. If you were looking for the proverbial “canary in a coal mine”, wouldn’t you think these people would be about the best indicators you could find in that respect?

While I like to think that Steve’s post was particularly prescient, in fact if you were listening to the same sources he apparently has been, it’s blindingly obvious. I don’t claim to be anywhere as smart as the people I linked to above, but I don’t think you really need to be if you’re listening to the right people, and overwhelmingly they’re saying there’s a problem.

Of course, we didn’t get ourselves in this mess overnight (become a consumer economy instead of production economy, as Maitri so deftly puts it), and we won’t dig ourselves out of it overnight either. Let’s just hope that our years of neglect of the educational system turn out better than our years of neglect of the levee system.

I also thought most Belgian ales were produced by spontaneous fermentation.

via Tipping the Spherical Cow.

My colleague Attila pointed me to X2, an effort by the Institute for the Future to collect and collaboratively rank hypotheses about future directions of science. When I read about it, it sounded interesting, but coming from futurists, I rather expected it to be all style and no substance.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a substantial amount of interesting content on the site, and it seems like the core functions all work as expected. Instead of being just another pawn in my attempt to own the first page of Google results for my name, William Gunn, (I dominate Mr. Gunn already 😉 ) I might actually spend some time there.

The basic function of the site is similar to Scintilla, in that users submit content and you can rate it and find related content you may not have seen, but instead of being fed by a collection of RSS feeds
(though there are user-suggested feeds as an input source), users submit “signals”, which are short essay-style blurbs about an idea or concept whose time is coming. “Hypotheses” can be written about the proposed meaning of a signal, and “forecasts” combine a set of signals which illustrate a trend. Because the types of content aren’t just blog posts parsed from a feed, the site isn’t overrun with noise, such as the scienceblogs.com blather that has troubled my use of other recommendation engines. Interestingly, the “Add a feed” link simply goes to a project info blurb, so perhaps they’re working on that very problem.

I said I would say nothing more about the efforts of some legislators to encourage and protect the teaching of their religion in our schools, but now Louisiana, my state, has gone and done the same idiotic thing Florida did. This is a nakedly obvious attempt to drum up some poll participation from the values voters(see stem cells and the 2004 election).
In the words of The Gambit Weekly,

the last thing Louisiana needs now is to portray itself to the world as an intellectual backwater.