Day: January 30, 2001

Normally I am a big fan of high tech jargon. I have no problem telling my wife I need to run off to update my blog. But there’s one word that is driving me nuts that seems to be catching on. That word is “cloud.”

Most of the time I don’t even know what these people are referring to when they use that term. The first time I remember hearing the term was in a fluff magazine piece on LoudCloud.Com, which was going to revolutionize how Internet infrastructure was managed.

More recently I’ve seen people use “cloud” as jargon for “network.” If a file on your server is updating a file on my server, I fail to see why we need to start reaching for weather metaphors to describe what is happening.

CNN is running what has to be the worst story line yet in the ongoing power crisis in California. According to CNN an audit of the largest electrical utility in California, Southern California Edison, made about $5 billion in profits from 1996-2000.

Now, of course, as the price that SCE has to pay for electricity has skyrocketed, while the price it can charge to consumers has remained the same by statute, SCE is in big trouble and is in debt just about $5 billion.

So what is the conclusion from these two sets of facts? According to Democrats such as California Senate President Pro Tem John Burton it is that, “Basically they took the money and ran.” If they’d kept those profits in SCE rather than sending the profits to SCE’s corporate parent, Edison Electric, SCE would have broken even.

Not. If SCE makes $5 billion in profits from 1996 to 2000 and then lose $5 billion from November 2000 through January 2001, it hasn’t broken even but rather has lost hundreds of millions of dollars since the capital sunk into SCE would have been a lot better off spent in some other sector of the market where it could earn a normal rate of return. With the situation described by CNN, SCE doesn’t even keep up with inflation.

This is exactly the sort of talk that makes companies not want to invest in California since what Burton and others are really saying is that it was wrong for SCE to want to make a profit. Instead of making profits, SCE should hold any surpluses it has to cushion the blow when the California legislature screws up again.

Source:

Audit: California utility reaped $4.8 billion dividend before power crisis. CNN, January 30, 2001.

It seems everybody is up in arms — and for good reason — over a report by MSNBC that N2H2 is selling data about students’ web surfing habits.

N2H2 sells web filtering software to schools. It’s been a business failure in that market so it decided to sell aggregated data about what sites students are visiting. N2H2 says it doesn’t sell what specific sites a given student visits, but rather say information on how many time students in a school district visited CNN’s home page, for example. This is very valuable information even when it is aggregated in this way.

Is this legal? Is it ethical?

Actually this would seem to be a pretty clear case of a human rights violation. Once N2H2 takes the aggregated data of the students and begins turning it into reports which it then markets to other companies, it is engaged in research and the students are human test subjects.

There are stringent rules and regulations about the treatment of human test subjects, especially when they are captive audiences such as school children are. Where I work, for example, we do a lot of research asking kids about their opinion of their schools. The data is aggregated as N2H2 does, so what a particular student thought about his school is never reported back.

To do this we have to follow strict rules that are overseen by a review board on human experiments. The key thing we have to do which N2H2 is unlikely to have done is give students the ability not to participate in the study. If they don’t want to tell us what they think of their school, that is their right.

Similarly, although N2H2 may have a legitimate contract to block students from accessing certain web sites, if it is going to collect and aggregate data about what students are viewing on the web it has to give every student the right to opt out and exclude his or her web surfing behavior from the aggregated data.

If I were a student at a school that uses an N2H2 product I’d consider a lawsuit on the grounds that N2H2 is acting in contravention to numerous laws protecting the rights of test subjects to be informed and to decline to be the subject of research.

Scientists working at Syngenta and Myria Genetics Inc. reported they successfully decoded the genome of a variety of rice known as Nippon-Bare. A government-funded effort to decode the rice genome is also under way, but is at least two years behind the private effort.

Rice is, of course, one of the most important foods in the world. Almost 3 billion people worldwide eat rice, with 91 percent of all rice being grown in Asia.

The rice genome consists of 12 chromosomes with an estimated 50,000 total genes. The rice genome is the second largest genome decoded to date, with only the human genome being larger.

The biggest surprise in the decoding, according to researchers, was the similarity that the rice genome has to cereal crops.

“The biggest surprise,” Dr. Steve Briggs told the BBC, “is that the overall gene architecture and sequences is nearly identical to that of cereals. This means we truly have a planet genetic blueprint.”

This will make it easier to transfer findings in the rice genome to corn, wheat and other cereal crops. Briggs said that the functions of 80 percent of the genes are currently understood, while 20 percent of the genome remains a mystery.

The decoding of the rice genome is the latest in a series of genetic discoveries hailed by everyone except extreme environmentalists. Von Hernandez, campaign director of Greenpeace in South East Asia, told Reuters that the decoding of the rice genome is “a disturbing development.”

According to Hernandez, the rice genome is pointless because,

It’s not a shortage of food, which is a problem because there is food. It’s a problem of poor people having access that cannot be addressed by technological breakthrough.

This claim is inaccurate on a number of levels. First, although it is technically true that there is more than enough food grown to feed the world’s population, a significant amount of that food is grown to be used as animal feed.

In addition genetic modification of the rice genome promises to cut the cost of food in much the same way that the Green Revolution caused food prices to decline or stay stable over time thanks to increased supplies. Anything that leads to cheaper food worldwide is a very good thing for the world’s poor.

Finally, genetically modified food allows for diseases to be addressed which cannot be cured by simple access to food alone. For example, even in parts of Asia where people have more than enough calories to sustain themselves, millions suffer from vitamin A deficiency because rice lacks any vitamin A. Recently, however, a genetically modified rice variant has been introduced which contains beta-carotene and if widely planted could largely solve Vitamin A-related health problems.

All in all, the decoding of the rice genome is amazing and likely to dramatically increase world food supplies over the long term.

Source:

Rice genome falls to science. January 26, 2001.

Greenpeace says rice genome mapping “disturbing.” Reuters, January 29, 2001.