Influenza and the World Community Grid

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Worldcommunity grid is a datagrid style project where almost half a million people are offering computer cycles to help advance scientific research in a number of fields such as health, nutrition and more. One of the most recent projects to be added to the collection is the one for Influenza. If you so chose you can help speed up the process of finding a solution to the influenza problem.

There is an interesting documentary on History HD called The Virus empire which uses a number of interviews with WHO officials and actors to demonstrate why over-hyping a new virus is the smart thing to do. One interviewee in particular said “If you went back to an army doctor in 1918 and told him that whilst 170 people had died already up to 50 million could die within the year from the Spanish Flu then he would have told you to go back to the 21st century.” What was poignant with this statement is the blasé nature that some people showed towards Swine Flu in certain circumstances.

Two or three weeks ago they said that it may take up to four months to find a solution to the Swine Flu virus. Now take into account the WHO’s effort to get a number of research labs to work in collaboration against the SARS virus and it’s interesting. Apparently it took four days to learn everything there was to know about the nature of the virus but not how to cure it.

That’s where the World Community grid Influenza project comes in. The more computers are used to run models to see which are the best solutions to research the quicker we may have a way of dealing with this new virus.

The project is free and here are the projects you can currently help with;

Help Fight Childhood Cancer
Influenza Antiviral Drug Search
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2
FightAIDS@Home
Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together
Help Conquer Cancer
Nutritious Rice for the World
The Clean Energy Project

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PodcampUK – Part 1 of the debrief

Byrichard

There are many podcamps but Podcampuk was my podcamp. This was an event which was similar to just one previous experience. It was an event where everyone you talked to had at least one website and others may have had several. They also used twitter and prepared radio programs.

What is great about the podcast UK crowd is that they’re a creative entrepreneurial group. Rather than take a 9 to 5 job some work as freelancers. They have a variety of skills from drivers to information technology people, university and schoolteachers and more. They range in age from mid twenties and upwards. It’s a nice sample of people.

When I arrived on Friday night I heard John Buckley talk about his podcast Dissident Vox and it was interesting to see him describe the cost of creating podcasts. He was talking about time. For certain topics he would spend more than seventy hours researching the topic in order to gain an in depth understanding of his topic. Another podcaster mentioned how the personal nature of podcasts, reaching their audience through earphones, meant that he should be careful about how to present his research. In reality certain podcasters are highly informed people who want to present their ideas and worry as much as academics about what they present.

Podcasting I simpler than some thought initially. One great example of this is the presentation by Jason Jarrett who talked about how he had complicated his own life when learning about podcasting. Equipment requirements for podcasting are not as great as some had expected. He talked about how he had purchased one piece of technology and then another to attempt to resolve an issue he was having, sound in just one ear. It’s only after a few weeks that he was informed that the problem was mono sound. He was a great presenter getting many laughs from his audience.

Another presenter that was of interest is the one by Trevor Dann from the Radio Acadamy talking about broadcasting. What I got from his presentation is the contrast between professional sports and broadcasting. In both mediums people who are at the top of the scale can make really good money whilst those at the bottom do so mainly for the pleasure. One point which I thought was of particular interest was that of amateur cricket players not taking money away from the professionals. In other words both could cohabit quite easily. I really appreciated that sentence.

For months or even years I have been worrying about the new media and what effect it will have on me whilst I look for work. If more and more people want to get content for free and appreciate mediocrity would this mean that there is less space for professional content to be in demand. According to that speech I understood that whilst people’s consumer habits are changing the need and appreciation of well-produced work will still be great enough to make a living. In effect both complement each other.

As more and more people pick up a microphone and camera to create their content so the same passion from amateur footballers watching the best of the best is transposed from the amateur viewer to the professional player.

Podcasting has a great diversity of talent and some participants of podcamp UK looked at this from an education point of view. Joe Dale from the Isle of Wight was telling us about how he was using podcasting within the classroom. He is in charge of students ranging from 7 years and up and encourages them to create audiovisual content which will help them learn French. They have to produce, write and script their own shows. As a result of this they are involved in improving their written work as well as their aural skill. This is a great, and for young students, far more fun way of learning. It also creates an opportunity to link with people living in different parts of the world. If you’re in England and you’re learning one language then via the World Wide Web it is easy to reach a global audience who may give feedback as to how you could improve.

What made Podcamp UK so interesting is the European flavour of the event. One person travelled from Rome to be there whilst UK podcasters came from everywhere in England. As a result of this we saw what the British podcast environment has to offer rather than be limited by what’s going on in San Francisco. I’m glad I got to meet so many interesting individuals with so many interesting projects and I hope to remain in contact with them and see how their ideas progress. It was a great look at the podcasting sub-culture and how it’s progressed in parallel with mainstream media.

Over seventy thousand tweets and my opinions about twitter have not changed.

Byrichard

For tree years I’ve been using twitter and for at least a year I believed that this was the great social connector, the website that would turn our passive, faceless web habit into something more personal. Of course I was wrong about this. Anonymity is still as great as ever but in a new sense of the word.

That motivation to connect, to establish meaningful relationships with people is weak. You see this through every twitter tweet, through every interaction. You see this through the contemporary attitude towards online and electronic conversation.

Have you ever listened to two non users speak about computer communications? “I don’t want to use it because I don’t want to lose my privacy”, and the second person “I won’t use it because I don’t want to be stalked, I don’t want someone calling me without me consenting to it. It’s the same line over and over. It’s the line we were given as children about accepting sweets from people we don’t know.

The only difference is that these people are grown ups, and the bad stranger is a globalised system of conversation commonly referred to as twitter and another called facebook. Both have been around for a while now and it’s interesting to see how much greater the usage of facebook has grown compared to that of twitter.

Facebook, however foreign, however bizarre, however shy in nature is a relatively well respected and appreciated addition to the student life, and to some lesser extent the professional life. That is because it was built around a very private and closed community. So private it was exclusive to one university, then one nation of universities, then the global university before finally becoming a public hangout where you say who your real life friends are, and where their names are visible, their picture is available, their affiliations too.

In a sense Facebook is the greatest breach of privacy you could think of. Stalking, as some people worry about is so much easier. At the same time it’s relatively untouched because of the personal security settings that are a common part of every day life.

Now take a look at twitter. It’s a hundred and fourty characters of text at a time. That’s not much information. It’s less than an SMS. It’s basically a chat on a global scale. There is no threading, or at least there wasn’t. There was no @ sign. There was no concept of reply.

Everything that twitter has become is through a great enough number of users agreeing on a communication convention for it to become part of the site’s fabric. This has been demonstrated a number of times. What makes twitter so “versatile” is also what makes it so unappealing as a communication tool for the most interesting people you know.

Anyone with a normal life does not feel the need to communicate virtually to strangers. They prefer person to person interactions in the real world. Twitter is a waste of time. Spend an hour looking at a timeline and you’ll see what strangers are doing all around the world. Now ask just one person to meet and you’ll have no one to meet in great swathes of landscape. That’s because it’s for wealthy people according to some research, 67 percent of college graduates, so educated too.

I read in a read write web post that whilst eighty seven percent of people asked knew about twitter or facebook fourty seven percent use facebook and only seven percent use twitter. The article, in it’s analysis went on to say that twitter is far more complicated to start than facebook. I can’t help but think creating a username on twitter would be faster than on facebook. All you need on twitter is the username after all.

I think it has a lot to do with today’s social values, the fabric of the society within which we live. People have no problem with e-mail communication. They have no problem with phone conversations. They have a serious problem with electronic social interaction. There are a number of factors for this being the case. One of these is our superficiality, why commit to a person whom we have never met, never smiled at? Why commit your thoughts and opinions on paper, in a place where google can index them so easily, and eventually to be called on them. Does that make twitter appealing? No, it doesn’t.

What about the barrier to entry. How many people have a computer that boots up within ten seconds, a permanent internet connection and a machine performant enough to deal with twitter and other sites. You may scoff at this last suggestion but have you tried using social websites on older less powerful machines? I have and it’s a laggy unpleasant experience. Hardly appealing to your average user. Then there’s the matter of time. How many hundreds to thousands of tweets do you need to read before you come to an interesting person? How committed are they to the site? If they post five times a month no personal connection will be established. If they spend all of their time on twitter is this as a result of unemployment or are they on the move with any of a number of smartphones? Do your normal friends have the funds for a smartphone and data contracts so that they are online? Is there a need?

The conclusion is a simple one. In a society where people see the computer as a geeky waste of time for nothing more than work, where face to face interaction is prized above all else then facebook is the clear winner. You add friends from every chapter of the life you have already written for yourself. On twitter you’re building on the future, behind a computer, only to find that the early adopter lifestyle means you have to travel to meet these individuals. In other words unless you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer then twitter is a complete and utter waste of time.

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Andrew Keen at the Frontline Club

Byrichard

Content creation and distribution has become far cheaper than it was in the past. Whereas in the past you’d have tons of equipment to create television programs today the barriers to entry are lower as a result of which the cult of the amateur is allowed to flourish. As the technology is adopted by more people those who have never studied the theorie point and shoot. What this means is that there is a huge amount of mediocrity on the web. Some like to say that it’s ninety nine percent crap and they’d be right. Why else use a search engine?

The cult of the amateur is a great thing because it encourages those who have no training to produce content for others to enjoy. The problem is that they’ve had no training. As a result they’re sloppy. They don’t shoot b-roll. They don’t edit anything and then they put it on the web. What’s worse is that it’s long.

Andrew Keen concentrated on audio and really wanted it to promote the sharing of great works and high culture. Instead there has been a steady rise in low culture. This is a debate that goes back to the days of Adorno when public literacy for all became a hot topic. Over time the general level of knowledge increased and so the natural balance returned.

Professional journalists are investigative, going out and doing their own research before digesting this information out and writing their pieces. They have an in-depth knowledge of their topic and rather than go off on tangents they are going to backup everything they say with facts.

I listened to a woman present her theories about one topic a few days ago and she always said “I did this” and “I did that”, a few days letter I listened to journalists, ambassadors and other professionals speak about how “we did these things” and “we did those things”. They often looked at creating a sense of a community or group of people working on an idea.

The point is that whilst everyone has opinions which they want to share not all of them have the credentials to provide the content. Whilst as individuals our knowledge is not detailed enough to be of value if all of us work together towards a common goal then that work is of a greater value, hence the reason behind wikipedia’s success as a resource.

During the Andrew Keen conversation talent was discussed and whether it is natural or whether it takes years to aquire. The discussion focused on the gatekeepers and how they were there to find talent, polish it and then commercialise it. He saw the value of transparency for trust. Both evidence and backing up the information help make resources more reliable. As a student you learn that there is no point in writing something down until you have found someone to backup your sentiment with research.

Andrew Keen, to get a definite rise out of the crowd referred to bloggers as a mob and who can blame him. Whilst Journalists go out and interview people and do a lot of background research before writing about their topic of interest bloggers tend to go on what others have written. Whilst listening to this it brought up thoughts about how blogging would be better for content analysis since it is easier to read a collection of articles and write about them than to go out and get access to all those of interest. Andrew Keen made the remark that many blogs do not have original content, recycling what they found on a variety of resources.

At one point Keen did accept that his book was written tongue in cheek and that whilst the book had a lot of success in Canada and England the Americans did not understand his point of view. He went on to say that he knew who he was writing it against rather than who he was writing it for. He said that it was a response to digital eutopians. At this point he made clear that he was not a technological determinist but a social one. In other words he believes that people, rather than technology determine the type of life and interaction we have with our environment.

Towards the end of his conversation he spoke about web 3.0 as the rediscovery of expertise and professionalism, point which agrees with one of my earlier posts. He wanted the information economy to be about distributed trusted content. He also wanted it to be given a solid backbone.

During the Q&A one person asked him whether he was a troll searching to annoy people through the writing of his book. He answered humourously that bloggers don’t read books. It was a clear and deliberate provocation but it was clear that he meant this as a joke rather than a direct attack.

I don’t agree with all of the points made by Andrew Keen but he does make some interesting and valid points about the future of the media. it’s something that we must all think about. Culture production is an important aspect of our lives and it would be a shame, after centuries of hard work, to promote works of mediocrity.

Finally if you would like to listen to the speech in person it can be found at this address

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