As announced today in Technology Review the trend of social networks now applies in the fields of genetic science. A new service is currently online, where you can compare your DNA with that of family and friends.

We are witnessing a boom in the field of social networks, which now expands to medical fields, where privacy is of utmost importance. My concern is not if these services actually protect their customers, but if customers really realize where they are getting into.

23andMe

The service is called 23andMe and is

a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA. After providing a saliva sample using an at-home kit, you can use our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.

All they require from you is a sample of your spit and 999$. Then, they will gather all sorts of medical and genetical information and send you a thorough analysis. Purpose of this social network is not only to answer the question “where do I come from?” but also “how do I compare to other people?” Apart from that, as Technology Review notes

23andMe offers information about an individual’s disease risk. But it has also opted to emphasize more entertaining approaches to personal genomics, including using colorful visualization tools to look at a subject’s ancestry and compare it with that of celebrities from Jesse James to Benjamin Franklin and Bono. Now, to capitalize on the boom in social networking, the company will launch a genome-sharing tool that allows people to compare their genome with those of family members, friends, and even strangers who have offered up their DNA data.

It all sounds fun, but a person’s medical history is very thin ice and I wonder if potential users come to realize that.

23andMe’s Privacy Statement

The Privacy Statement of 23andMe is very clear and covers several issues to protect its users.

• they can choose if they want to share their information,
• the information collected are non-personal used for research and never released outside the company without the user’s consent
• users can delete their account anytime, which is also deleted from the company’s database.

It is obvious, that 23andMe takes privacy very seriously - and it should. Users are protected in multiple levels and given a variety of choices.

But one of the main reasons to join 23andMe is the community driven system. Users will likely want to compare information, they will want to see if they have the same genes as Gandhi; and that’s where the real privacy issues emerge.

Privacy in Social Networks; more important than ever

Until now, participators in most social networks were sharing information, of minimal importance: their favourite links, their hobbies, their bio or the number of their friends. Of course these are also subjects, that should be carefully shared, but no big harm can be done.

But with services like 23andMe, we are seeing a transformation in social networks and the privacy issues, that emerge.

Social networking is mostly fun and play, but when it comes to sharing information of your own DNA, things become much more serious. I’m not going to list the problems of publicly showing your medical history/future, these are obvious.

But users of social networks, should start thinking with extreme caution, which networks they should join. The fun and joy remains in social networking, but the hazards seem to increase.

Would you share information about your genealogical tree and your medical history with the wide public of the social web?

Will paper survive the digital era?

It’s a discussion, that started couple of weeks ago with an article of Alex Iskold and really got me thinking.

I really enjoy the merits of technology and always welcome new innovations; but also like going back to print and reading a good book.

So maybe, I would never set books aside to read from any other digital form; but this is just me.

But if we see the subject in a more global level, could digitalization really overpower print? I think not, due to the very nature of these two media.

Print Media

Marshall McLuhan once noted

All the words in the world cannot describe an object like a bucket, although it is possible to tell in a few words how to make a bucket.

Words are inadequate to convey visual information. They leave everything to the imagination, as one of the great laws of bibliography signifies:

The more there were, the fewer there are.

Print allows us to mentally react to and reconstruct information, but this is not the property that will allow it to survive digitalization.

The greatest asset for its survival is, that it requires our full attention and doesn’t allow any abstractions.

Imagine being completely isolated, with just one book in your pocket. If you decide to “interact” with the book, your only option is to concentrate on the book and read it.

Digital Media

Now imagine being completely isolated, with just your laptop. You can watch film, read text, listen to music, connect with people and many more. The possibilities provided by a digital medium are countless.

The coexistence of overlapping windows is now a fundamental principle of the modern GUI and in fact a very common practice among users. Lack of concentration is bound to happen, when several services run simultaneously.

This coexistence of information in a digital medium can be compared with the phenomenon of zapping.

Under that perspective, I find it very hard to substitute paper with any digital medium.

If we disregard the tiresome effect of reading from a screen or the difficulty of editing (running your pen over the text to underline and keep notes), digital reading is still not our best choice. In digital media, the distractions are many and reading would require much more time.

Conclusion

I disagree here with Mark Dykeman, since I don’t see paper dying, even if we had

1. better screens,
2. easier to edit text and
3. free internet access everywhere.

A monitor has multimedia possibilities, paper doesn’t. Whenever we are dealing with a lengthy read or an important document, paper is necessary to keep us concentrated.

For me the only option of digital replacing print is when E-Paper replaces tree-paper. Although, we are far from it realization, such a technology could bring revolutionary results, only because it utilizes the advantages of the digital by keeping simplicity of paper.

I’m really interested to see, how you see this potential of the extinction of paper.

How often do you print out documents you want to read? If you observe the younger generations and the popularity of newspapers, books and magazines, could you imagine the near future without massive use of paper?

The Technology Review posted the other day an article on the “10 Emerging Technologies of 2008“. Very promising technologies indeed, but the one that really caught my attention was the Probabilistic Chips currently studied by Krishna Palem.

The reason I find this particular research so interesting is, that

• it has the potential of extending current scaling laws - and particularly Moore’s Law
• it takes advantage of the principles of collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds.

The theory of Probabilistic Chips

According to the article

Palem has developed a way for chips to use significantly less power in exchange for a small loss of precision. [...] chips could be designed to produce the correct answer sometimes, but only come close the rest of the time. Because the errors would be small, so would their effects: in essence, Palem believes that in computing, close enough is often good enough.

Current Scaling Laws

From the beginning of the twentieth century until today, a series of laws has emerged concerning the growth of computers and networks. They all negotiate the value of a network according to the technological leverage of the time.

• Sarnoff’s law, which was interested in the growth of radio and television networks (the value of the network is proportional to the number of actors)
• Metcalfe’s Law describing the value and the growth of small scale networks (the “value” or “power” of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network).
• Reed’s Law describing the value of Group Forming Networks (the value of networks, that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size).
• Moore’s law handling the evolution and expansion of computer microchips (the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years).

One can notice the evolution from Sarnoff’s Law to Reed’s Law.

While Sarnoff’s Law was suggesting, that the value of a broadcast station (television or radio) would increase proportionally to its audience it could not be applied to more complex networks, since the degree of interconnectivity was much higher.

So Metcalfe’s Law was an evolutionary step of Sarnoff’s Law, which better described the upcoming computer networks (ARPANET) in the 1960s. But Metcalfe’s Law could be easily be applied to small computer or telephone networks, but certainly not to huge networks like the Internet.

Reed’s Law emerged to describe the masive development of the web and more specifically of the social web.

Moore’s Law, on the other hand remains stable. Although it finds application on the expansion of computer microchip technology for more than 40 years, its validity is lately at stake. The reason is, that silicon transistors are becoming smaller and smaller and therefore less reliable.

But that’s where the probabilistic chips come in play, to keep the microprocessor technology rapidly evolving.

With probabilistic chips, tiny microprocessors may be designed in such way, that the individual parts might be imperfect, but collectively bring perfect results.

Collective Intelligence

The probabilistic chip technology actually takes advantage of the theory of collective intelligence.

As supported by the Condorcet Jury Theorem [pdf], the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100% as the size of the group increases. The validity of the Theorem is based on the hypothesis, that the answers provided by each individual are not random - but instead there is a more than 50% probability to be correct.

The Condorcet Jury Theorem might be criticized when we are dealing with humans, but machines can be programmed to work in such a manner.

It seems to me, that this is how cultural revolutions emerge: combining disciplines, which at first seem irrelevant to bring forth innovative ideas and technologies.

Probabilistic chips, can change the scenery of energy consumption, mobile technologies and microprocessor development; and all that by applying an almost 200 old theory to a completely different research field.

I know that Google’s Street View is old news.

Google actually uses an extremely high-tech camera, scrounges the streets and takes photos. I’ve never really used the service myself, but while surfing today I found some articles that drew my attention on the subject.

Invading Privacy

Mashable: Mashable’s top 15 google street view sightings is supposed to be an entertaining article listing some pictures of several interesting and funny places around the world. What is disturbing in this article is not only the complete disregard of people’s privacy but also the quality and quantity of comments.

There are currently 155 comments linking to other sighting (guy picking his nose or girl showing her panties, etc.) or praising the humor of the article. From these 155 comments only 8 are actually referring to the factor of privacy.
Googlesightseeing: A little bit more search down the road and I found googlesightseeing.com. This site’s niche is posting images from Google Maps and Google’s Street View. Of course this might not directly say anything about privacy issues, since images of people are not that often on the site. But it implies something else:

There are people, who are extensively searching these all-viewing databases. So it is not the government, the CIA or “add conspiracy theory here” but ordinary people that are breaking the privacy barrier.

Psychology of Control

The panopticon was a model prison proposal of Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The idea was that the prisoners could not see the guards observing them. Although the concept was never realized, Bentham

pointed out that the prison could employ very few guards, since the prisoners could not know when they were being watched. The project’s key concept, however, wasn’t about architecture or economics; it was about the psychology of control.

In other words, people will start developing a sense of being constantly observed and therefore behave accordingly. It seems that there is not only a central authority, which practices control and surveillance, but also the society in general. Google’s Street View is one of the tools provided to the public to spy on each other.

Between private and public

But where are the boundaries between private and public?
There has been a great discussion on the subject;

• some state that Google’s street view is a major privacy issue, which will be subject in upcoming legal discussion

• while others don’t see any privacy violation, since the people are already in public.

It is already questionable how can we achieve true privacy, but the question goes beyond the boundaries of public and private. We are witnessing the development of an all-seeing, all-knowing society.
I’m already against any surveillance of any kind but moreover should the public really have access to such spying tools?

I just finished listening to an interview of Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web (63min). Very insightful information on the future and development of the Web. The relation of web 2.0 and web 3.0, the technological development of the semantic web and privacy are some of his points, that I found mostly interesting.

He underlines the ability of the semantic web to connect data with metadata. A function, which will make our work easier, faster and therefore more productive.

It’s the connection from the data to the provenance of the data, and not just for the name of the document that it came from, but the actual properties of that - the licensing, what it’s supposed to be used for, what it’s appropriate to use it for, whether I got it because I’ve gone through an authentication process, and actually whether it’s private data, which I should not actually publish at all.

Tim Berners Lee already sees some of the most popular social networks taking advantage of semantics.

They haven’t just allowed you to tag something with somebody’s name, they’ve allowed you to capture the difference between somebody who took the photo and somebody who’s in the photo, so that the power of the reuse of the data has been much greater.

He also talks about the development level of the semantic web, saying that the technologies necessary are already there.

I think, really we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything. I suppose, really you should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realizing it’s time to just go do it.

The only piece missing from the semantic puzzle is the actual implementation of these technologies to current systems. An effort, which - according to Tim Berners Lee - is easy and financially worthwhile.

But, the thing that’s holding us up is that, there’s data which the companies have got on this, sitting and going round and round on its disks. Or it’s in their SQL systems and needs to be exported in a way that we can get at it in linked RDF as a SPARQL. And then, that could be reused.

One more remark, that drew my attention was about privacy. Tim Berners Lee advocates for openness of data - at least in a company level. He supports exposure and integration; companies should give the ability to the people to do queries on their data. This can give them a great advantage against their competition.

If a company has got this feeling where people don’t want other people in the company to know what is going on, then, it has already got a problem, this just exposes the problem.

On a more individual level he argues, that users should get hold of their data. That’s where the semantic web really diverts from the web 2.0 model. The web 2.0 model incorporates sites, which have their data and they don’t share it. The Web 3.0 gives the power back to the user

Web 2.0 is a stovepipe system. It’s a set of stovepipes where each site has got its data and it’s not sharing it. What people are sometimes calling a Web 3.0 vision where you’ve got lots of different data out there on the Web and you’ve got lots of different applications, but they’re independent.

There are much more information to be collected in this interview. This were just the stuff I found most interesting. Marshall Kirkpatrick concentrates on other subjects.

So don’t be satisfied with any short summary, listen to the actual interview or read the transcript.

Blogs are almost 10 years old. They are probably the first tool, that gave a voice to the wider public. The revolution they brought, started slowly but developed steadily. it hasn’t been long, that almost everyone has the power to express himself/herself and literally contribute to media production.

In these 10 years, blogs have also expanded in a variety of forms:

• Video/Photo- blogs: instead of writing copy, people have used their camera to express themselves.
• AudioBlogs: similarly, people express their thoughts verbally. The iGeneration, subscribes to podcasts and listens to discussions, interviews, books, ideas, disputes, etc.
• MicroBlogs: a relatively new way of blogging, which facilitates the wide use of mobile phones. People follow each other, to see what they can say in 140 characters.
• LiveBlogs: that’s the IRC version of blogging; anyone been online for 10-15 years can see the obvious similarities.

These genres are just a representative example of the possibilities of blogs. But purpose of this post is not to define these categories. Instead, I’m wondering if the blogosphere’s potential is actually exhausted.

Remediating

For anyone blogging actively and daily for more than a couple of months, probably understands what I’m implying.
Bertolt Brecht in the early 1930s was talking about the radio as a communication apparatus; a medium, which people can use not only to listen but also produce and communicate. His vision got realized in the cyberspace and blogging era.
The revolution of the blogosphere was 10 years ago, when it brought the production process to the public. Previously, we were witnessing few producers providing data to many readers; now every reader is a potential producer (what Inke Arns described as ‘small media production‘).

The technologies and genres developed after that explosion are not revolutionary anymore. They just apply the revolution to new fields (video, audio, mobile, etc.).
What audio-, video-, audio-, micro-, live-blogs in the end bring is the practices of old media to the immersive environment of the blogosphere. The similarities of blogs to newspapers, videoblogs to television, audioblogs to radio are more than obvious.

Are blogs really a new medium, which will change the way we perceive media production? I believe it is. The problem is again comfort and convention. Mass media production is so deeply embedded in our flesh, that we take it for granted and continue producing with the same old tactics.

Redefining

So is there a way to redefine the blogging process and take advantage of its full potential? In order to re-revolutionize the blogosphere, we should keep some important aspects in mind, aspects, that seem natural to us but we usually forget about them:

1. Communication. We don’t write content for passive users to read, but for active producers to discuss.
2. Connection. The six degrees theory is very insightful, but in the blogosphere people seem to be more connected than in any other network.
3. Combination. There are thousands of tools that can be implemented in a blog. It is our job to study their applications - and hopefully find new ones.
4. Exploration. We should not only explore the blogosphere for new, insightful voices, but also the topics. Blogging is a powerful tool, we shouldn’t use it only to write about making money online.

Conclusion

Redefining the blogosphere and providing something honest, intriguing and revolutionary is certainly not a simple process. I cannot provide a step-by-step guide on doing something radical with this medium; but instead of thinking about our next post, its content and its subject, we should also think about the medium.

Is it possible to use blogs in a completely new way? How can we expand the blogging experience?
I’m interested to see if you are using or thinking about using different tools to evolve your blog.

The way Robert Scoble used Twitter to get questions of the public and directly pose them in the Davos meeting is a great combination of the existing tools and an example we should all get inspired from.

The explosion of the social web has redefined the way we perceive social connections, our individual role in the social grid (may it be online or offline) and the importance of the collective intelligence. We, the user of the social web, take full advantage of this revolution by promoting our blogs, our work, our affiliates, our software. To an extent all our practices in the social web are working for our self-interest.

Social Connections

before the social web, we were dealing with the interesting, intriguing theory of the ‘six degrees of seperation‘. The main principle of the six degrees theory simply says that

everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we’re so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we’re so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection… I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

Anyone who is deeply engaged in the social web, will argue that this theory underestimates the power of the web. Blogs, social networks, forums and communities enable interaction between two individuals in less than six steps; or at least that’s how it feels like.

The role of the individual

Sometimes when we analyze the tree, we lose sense of the forest. If we observe social networks from really high above, we will notice that they have reestablished our trust to democratic procedures. How many times have your heard people saying: “one vote never made a difference”.
It seems, that in the social web one vote does make a difference. That’s why we put a ‘thumbs up’ at StumbleUpon, or digg a submission, or cast our vote in Mixx. It is just one vote; but we trust that collectively this vote will bring a change.

The collective intelligence

A direct result of our trust to the individual is our belief in the collective intelligence. That’s why we firstly read the top news of all these news aggregators. Because we know, that these news are the most important/intriguing/thought provoking/interesting ones.

Machines were not made to sleep

So just our interaction and participation in the social web, actually proves that we believe that one vote, one individual, one voice, one computer can make a difference - can provide to the commons. In one way or another our participation in the social web is self-interested. We vote other submission, because we hope people will vote ours too; we comment on other blogs to learn more about a subject and hopefully receive a comment on our work; we use news aggregators so that we will not have to search for the most interesting news in this sea of data.

Maybe it’s time to do something completely altruistic, which will prove that we really believe in the big difference one individual can make.
The first step is to leave your computer on, when you are not using it (it isn’t energy waste if the computer actually works). After all, machines were not made to sleep.

Distributed Computation

There are several scientifical, mathematical, ecological, biological, astrological projects out there, which could use the power of your computer for their research. You can actually use the idle time on your computer (any computer, any OS) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover life in other plants, etc. These projects are based on the ideals of volunteer computing and grid computing.

The projects are numerous, but here is a list of the ones I use:

• World Community Grid: humanitarian research on new and infectious disease, natural disasters and hunger.

• Rosetta@home: determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases.

• SETI@home: saying that we are alone in the universe is the most selfish thought I’ve ever heard. SETI’s goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth.

A detailed list of the projects and their description can be found at boinc projects. This list doesn’t have all distributed computed projects; if your aware of any other, please let me know.

The process of participating in these projects is simple 3 step process:

1. You choose the project(s) you would like to participate and register.
2. You go to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) site and dowload the software.
3. The software has an easy wizard to incorporate any project in it.

Both images taken from BOINC.