30.5.09

Genetic Freaks on the Horizon

Let's follow some serial posting and research-skewering. Over at Brazen Careerist Max Marmer quotes a Newsweek article which discusses an original research paper. The paper seems quite interesting. In a study of Special Forces (SF) Soldiers, they not the levels of Neuropeptide-Y (NPY) in the blood. From the paper:

In both the large group (n = 49) and the small group (n = 21), NPY values of non-SF and SF soldiers did not differ at baseline. Wen tested immediately after exposure to acute stress, however, SF soldiers had significantly greater levels of NPY compared to non-SF soldiers. In addition, 24 hours after the completion of survival training, NPY levels in SF soldiers had returned to baseline, wehereas thouse of non-SF soldiers were significantly below baseline values.

and just what is NPY good for? Again, from the paper:
A large body of evidence suggest sthat NPY is a neurotransmitter and neurohormone intimately involved in the body's stres responses. The current finding of enhanced NPY responses to acute stress in individuals recognized as "stress hardy" may represent a step toward improving out understanding of the various factors tha contribute to sterss resilience and sterss vulnerbility in humans.
They very cautiously and reasonably conclude:
The current data underscore the potential therapeutic benefits of NPY agonists in humans - an issue that may be clarified by investigating the effets of NPY agonists in the treatment of individuals suffering from anziety and stress-related disorders.
So overall, a nice finding and very safe conclusions. They have made the link for the first time between the activity of NPY and stress responses. Then they propose that we can use this information in the treatment of certain disorders because we have a better understanding of stress-related biochemical pathways. But, here is what Marmer tells us:
Soon we will be able to model the chemical composition of these genetic freaks  and transfer that pattern to everybody. Not long after that we will begin trying patterns that no humans currently possess naturally. Admittedly all of this is a gross simplification but these types of technologies and procedures are on the horizon.
So in his world, we are going to find out how those individuals are regulating NPY and we are going to pump it up in everyone else and in the future we are all going to be so super stress-resistant we can.... uh.... work 100 hours a week!..... all be SF soldiers!....... yes! we can do everything! Oh, and patterns that no human currently possess naturally? how do you know that? Years and years (like decades) of work are needed to pick apart the details of biochemical pathways. I wish there would be some realistic talk about these interesting papers instead of bio-babel.

29.5.09

Reality Check

There is no way I am ever going to work in any office in Germany without near flawless German language skills. My goals of speaking fluent German need to be seriously ramped up to the next level. I'm talkin' from elementary to doctoral here. The new goal: A self-written blog post auf Deutsch by summers end.

Belio: Kudos!



Belio is a bilingual (Spanish/English) art magazine from Spain that has been around for 10 years. Their web site is nice but is only Spanish. (Plus, you can get back issues in the web store, but publication dates are a mystery.)

Each issue is dedicated to a specific theme and has artist spreads with accompanying essays. Overall it's pretty informative and they try to make it cohesive. I recently picked up the issue on Wildlife (I mean it had Darwin on the cover, could I not?) which has in the editorial:

Belio is an art and design publication, not an ecology, activism or animal liberation magazine. But as human beings, those of us who bring these pages into being also have hearts and consciences. We might be carnivores, but there is a big difference between eating meat and allowing animals' mistreatment for unjustified ends, from the genetic adulteration of species to abandoning pets in the street, passing through the extermination of animals with brutality and gratuitous violence.

I love how they explicitly aim to be an art/design magazine with a conscience.

I love how they introduce the reader to broad themes in an intelligent and non-self-righteous way.

Kudos!

28.5.09

Sustainable Development

That report I mentioned earlier (Prosperity without Growth? by Tim Jackson) is both very long and free to download.

Plus they have an interview with Jackson. The read is pretty long but the audio is less than 9 minutes.

Two Guardian Things

The Guardian Weekly has been one of my favourite newspapers since we were first introduced a decade ago. Last weeks print edition was particularly good if only for Madeleine Bunting's article entitled "Institutions share same delusion". It is perhaps one of the shortest and enjoyable analyses of the financial crisis I have read. I tried to find it online but to no avail (but she does have a blog), so I summarize:

In it she tackles the collapse of banking and of the British MP's expense controversy pointing to an endemic culture of entitlement which manifests itself as:

  1. If everyone is getting a piece of the cake, I want it too, and
  2. The (executive) cultural consensus of the L'Oréal's ad slogan "because you're worth it".

That second point is just a little piece of op-ed wonderfulness. This leads her to ask who decided your worth? and more importantly, at whose expense? She outlines the culture of entitlement which stems from governments as a function of growth (read GDP) and it is clear that continual growth in unsustainable. That results in future state interventions to curbs individual habits. Quote: "Leaving individuals to find the moral strength to resist the cultural pressures will simply not be effective. Our lives will have to be regulated in ways that we can't imagine." Wow. Does it make me a right-wing nut if I think there's some truth in that? The problem: more personal control is advocated, but we are living in an age where personal responsibility is only diminishing. I read this post over at Marginal Revolution where Alex Tabarrock asks who is more irrational, the fat kid who doesn't care that he is fat because by the time he is old enough to suffer the consequences there are going to be enough drugs to cure what ails him, or the people who think this will happen (or me, who thinks what a depressing place to live that is going to be, but I digress). The point is there is less pressure to take more responsibility, so Bunting pointing out the coming personal regulation is probably spot-on.

Bunting quotes two sources (which I haven't looked at):
  • "Prosperity Without Growth", by the SDC economist Tim Jackson (can we imagine a capitalism without economic growth?)
  • "The Politics of Climate Change", by Anthony Giddens (the huge role of state intervention)

Another interesting quote:

But these are times of unprecedented political exhaustion with the mainstream and with that comes a fast-growing appetite for radicalism and an abrupt break with the status quo.

In another article (Brussels braces for big protest vote) about the up-coming European Parliment elections:

The extreme right and hard left could do well in varying degrees in different countries. In the Netherlands, the Islam-baiting populist Geert Wilders, is soaring in opinion polls... Austrias'a extreme-right Freedom party is playing to antisemitism and could also do well. The British National party and Jobbik in Hungary, both often described as neo-fascist, could gain their first seats. In both France and Germany the big peripheral vote should be on the hard left: Die Linke (The Left) in Germany and the anti-capitalist movement of Olivier Besancenot in France.

We, the Petty Bourgeois

...but you have until the end of January to see Sigmar Polke at the Hamburg Kunsthalle.



From the exhibition web-site:

The ten-part series of unusually large works on paper occupies a very important place in the artist’s oeuvre due to the unique variety of figures, traces, signs and quotations from popular imagery it contains: echoes of “Capitalist Realism” from the 1960s blend with precursors to Polke’s chemical and optical experiments with colour in the 1980s as well as the political themes that were to become increasingly prominent in his work from the mid-1990s onwards. As such it provides a panoramic view of art and everyday life in the Federal Republic of Germany in a period marked by hippie culture, the new women’s movement and terrorism.





Armsrock Week

You have one more week to check out the Armsrock show in Berlin!



“A HORRIBLE JUNGLE”
A room installation made of drawings, and an archive of things done.
From 16.05.09 to 07.06.09

Intoxicated Demons gallery (I.D G)
Naunynstrasse 46

27.5.09

Swiss Farmers are People Too

Spiegel has an online gallery of Swiss farmers for an upcoming calendar.

They're not all this good though:

The New and Improved Mouse Genome, now with Open Access

One would be forgiven for being confused by the recent headline (BBC):

Scientists have finished sequencing the mouse genome after a 10-year effort.

Mouse geneticists have been using the mouse genome as a resource for years, so what does it mean that they have recently finished the mouse genome? Wasn't that published in 2002? No, actually that paper was appropriately titled "Initial sequencing and comparative analysis of the mouse genome" and while it was chock full of information it is, apparently, only the initial sequencing effort. The same thing happened with humans, the draft genome was published in 2001 but it wasn't so long ago that the finished genome was announced, to much fanfare. So now we are presented with the finished genome assembly of the mouse.

The problem with both is that there are always gaps in the sequences, even in humans. There are regions of the genome that are poorly assembled or not even sequenced because they are unique to individuals who have not been sequenced yet. That's really amazing actually, a paper that came out last year did a thorough screen for insertions (measured against the reference genome) in eight individual (African, Asian and Caucasian) and came up with 525 regions of novel sequence insertions, a couple as large as 130,000 bases (yes, that is large). The mouse genome is still being analyzed, and wild mice are poorly underrepresented in the reference sequence, which is exactly where abundant genetic variation resides. There is undoubtedly more information on the way.

Nature, which published the original (initial) sequencing paper has a nice timeline of mouse as a model organism set up.

OK, the other big news these days is the apparent discovery of the missing link. The unique (for biology) hype and marketing surrounding the publication of this finding have been discussed elsewhere. There is one thing particularly interesting for both the publication of the finished mouse genome and the missing link paper. These are both papers which (I'd bet) could have easily made it into Nature or Science, the two pan-science publishing powerhouses, but both appeared in Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. The major distinction is that PLoS is completly open access, so everyone, not only institutions with expensive licences, can read the fruits of scientific pursuit. PLoS Biology is as highly regarded as Nature and Science by this point and many scientists are starting to specifically publish in open access because they resent the restrictions that the closed journals put on their work. Kudos to the authors of both publications.

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber is a photographer exhibiting her work at the Jeu de Paume in paris

This is Every One no. 14 (1994) that can be found in a slide show at the Guardian Weekly website:


"Every One gives an unadorned, detailed vision of the architecture of the stitches on scars. These scars, photographed on unnamed patients in Parisian hospitals, become allegories of civil war".
They also have an article.

So good, so good...


Defending my Ph.D. felt like continually pressing a feel good button and having James Brown shout it out loud.

The questions were fair, the presentation was smooth (ok, there was a small but insignificant hic-cup), the discussion was good and the evening dinner was just how I wanted it. In the end I finish with a doctorate magna cum laude.

Baby, I feel good!

24.5.09

Thumbs pressed

15:30 is defense time!




Right now I'm clean shaven and groovin' with Architecture in Helsinki.
In 3 hours I'm getting my pictures taken.
In 5 hours I'm eating falafels.
In 7 hours I'm in the hot seat.
In 12 hours I'm eating tapas.

Keep your thumbs pressed, as the Germans say.

21.5.09

Big Pharma

There is a (not overly) revealing article about GlasoSmithKline at The Scientist written by Yvonne Greenstreet, the Chief Strategist of R&D. She discusses the process of scientists working to develop drugs. The process still remains a giant black box for most people taking those drugs and even most academic scientists. I think most academic scientists would describe big pharma in fairly negative terms. Once I mentioned a highly-regarded post-doc position at Novartis to the reply: "You're going to sell you soul?" No kidding, kids. Here are two interesting features:

Discovery Performance Units (DPUs, groups of 5 - 60 scienists):
  • Responsible for
    developing their own projects and drugs and for proving their effectiveness with
    preclinical trials.
  • Write their own business
    plans and defend them.
  • Freedom to go outside the company to build
    deals and partnerships with academia and other biotechnology companies.
  • Receive funding for three years, at which time
    their projects are reviewed and a decision made whether to terminate or continue.
  • Control their own budgets, which can be spent internally or externally.
There are currently 35 DPUs.

Discovery Investment Board (DIB):
  • Includes experts from venture capital companies and biotech CEOs.
  • Evaluates the research plans and funding.
  • Assess the capabilities of
    the DPU management teams.

The point of learning form academia comes up in the article. One point, as evidenced above, is that, just like in academia, scientists need some wiggle room, they need projects that have an opportunity to fail. The external reviews and the responsibility of writing their own business plans (read grant applications) is basically like in academia.

Play on Repeat

My three favourite Canadian artists at the moment are:



Go and listen!



20.5.09

Man hat den Krieg nicht gesehen...

...bis man ihn durch die Augen von Tarantino gesehen hat

The big fancy official website for Tarantino's new movie (Inglourious Basterds) is up, including many country specific versions. In Germany the swastika is a banned symbol, but the logo for the film uses it. Here's how it looks like on the Canadian site:



and on the German site:



I'm not sure why everything is smaller on the German language site though. It's worth watching the German language trailer to see Pitt yell in German too.

The Year of the Cave

Last year Nick Cave released the accomplished and matured Dig, Lazarus, Dig album, to much-deserved acclaim. This year the man continues his roll.



In September we can expect to see "The Death of Bunny Munro". From the publisher's website:
a dark and compelling portrait of characters who dwell on the fringes of society and stumble through life on a diet of drugs, chaos and disappointment, but who'll never give up stumbling which is in part why they fascinate us so much
This is his second book since the 1989 release of And the Ass Saw the Angel, which is still in print (also in translations).

Is it possible to love this man more?




A Policy for Referencing

The holy trinity of scientific literature is:
  • Be concise
  • Be precise
  • Be well annotated
Scientific publications fail mostly because of the first two, those are skills that are difficult to develop and depend on personal style. However, a standard level of proper annotation (read referencing), must be fulfilled. It shows familiarity with your field and helps you build a compelling story. Thus, I'm really dismayed at the standards of referencing on the internet. If we consider reporting that is a product of the internet (e.g. blogging), there appears to be two recurring referencing faults: none at all or serial (read useless) referencing.

The former is self explanatory and unacceptable. If you show me a picture you scooped on the internet, let me know where it came from! It's wonderful that tumblelogs (like Planet Tampon and Come to Me Bruce Lee, plus many others) offer quick distractions but they offer no commentary of the pictures nor references. I'm quite sure the photographer would love to be acknowledged and maybe the reader would like to find out what it is they're looking at at some point.

The latter is seemingly more prevalent- and more annoying. Even the most professional and widely-read blogs contain some mixture of original material and links to other blogs or other online resources. But in a juvenile I-saw-it-first attitude when referencing a cool article or website, bloggers are always clear to say which other blog they found that out from, avoiding school-yard toe-stepping. Surprisingly, sometimes that blog itself is only linking to yet another blog and you have a serial chain of links to follow before you reach the original article. The thing is, nobody really cares how you found out about something, what's important is the original material, send me there! For instance, while writing my thesis I discovered that the observed rate of double stranded breaks in mitotically dividing cells is approximately 10 events per cell division. I saw that in a review article for a key player in a sub-pathway of homologous recombination. They cited the original source of the information, I followed the citation and I also cited them in my thesis. I needed the original article to I could understand what I was referencing (it's basically taboo to reference something you haven't read and understood). Nobody cares that I originally found that interesting fact via a review article! It's completely inconsequential and is considered part of the literature review process, it's also nothing to be ashamed about. The only time a review article is cited is if they explicitly formulate ideas that are unique or if you just want to point your readers to a nice review of a field which is a bit tangential to your topic but interesting nonetheless.

If you want to acknowledge that you read and find interesting material from other blogs, write about them, or make a blog role on the side of your web site. But the only time they should be linked to is if they have presented some unique statement or concept which you need to acknowledge. Linking to an original source does not merrit citation (as that is basically the online equivalent of a review article) and makes tracking down original material more difficult and tedious than is necessary.

19.5.09

Get it now, so you can be cool too.

How iTunes describes Green Day's new single ¡Viva la Gloria!

Is it possible to dislike this band more?

Tulku: The Movie

I don't know when this is coming out, but...

The National Film Board of Canada has released the trailer and six clips from an upcoming movie from filmmaker Gesar Mukpo: Tulku. A Tulku is a recognized rebirth of a well-respected Tibetan Buddhist teacher. The film documents Tulkus of the west. Interesting!



My favourite line from the trailer: "The monastery there was basically a cesspool of jealousy, of gossip, of ... hate. Very un-Buddhist in a lot of ways."

Which is completly a typical non-Buddhist statement. What does Buddhist versus un-Buddhist mean?. It's the same as saying Good versus Bad. There is actually no such thing, according to Buddhist philosophy. Can there be such a thing as un-Buddhist? Because someone is a Buddhist in now way means they are any more enlightened than a non-Buddhist. It simply means they have heard and are listening to the teachings of the Buddha. Of course there will be jealousy, anger and dellusion. The three poisons don't disappear just because you say you're a Buddhist.

This reminds me of an interesting conversation I had in the winter at a party. I was speaking with someone my age and he mentioned a friend of his was Tamil and how horrible the things the Buddhists in Sri Lanka were doing. Incidentally, it's interesting when you speak to Tamils they refer to Sri Lankans as the Buddhists- almost, I imagine, in an attempt to use language to ignite disgust at un-Buddhist practices- but in the media they are always refered to as Sri Lankans. Anyroad, he mentioned how he was losing respect for the Buddhists because of this. But why does being a Buddhist, or being a Pacifist mean you cannot defend yourself. Pacificts are not slugs. I wonder if there has ever been a nation on earth which has not engaged in somekind of warfare for its sovernity.

You can find six clips of the movie on the NFB website, but they're all pretty short.

8.5.09

Chile House

The Hamburg Chilehaus:



This beautiful office block was built in the early 20's. From wiki:

The building is famed for its top, which is reminiscent of a ship's prow, and the facades, which meet at a very sharp angle at the corner of the Pumpen and Niedernstrasse.

The building was designed by the architect Fritz Höger and built between 1922 and 1924. It was commissioned by the shipping magnate Henry B. Sloman, who made his fortune trading saltpeter from Chile, hence the name Chile House.


Gaint Women are my Flotation Device

This past week I saw two animated movies. Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Tales of the Black Freighter (2009), which is a sub-plot from the Watchmen graphic novel that was not incorporated into the movie.

Somehow in both movies there appears a giant woman, floating in the sea, upon which our protagonists can lay in rescue.

From Bashir:


From Black Freighter:


The allegory of giant floating woman as saviour doesn't seem to be overly prevalent (read I didn't find any thing googling for "giant floating woman") and I can't quite recall any references. Of course there is always the Madonna as mother and Queen of Heaven. But she is not usually giant. But then I remembered back to a trip I took some years ago to Sansepolcro, a little Italian town, for the sole purpose of seeing a painting by Piero della Francesca: Madonna della Misericordia (1462). The center of the polyptych is dominated by the Virgin Mary:



At first I was struck by such an odd representation of the Virgin, she is literally a giant above the masses. But as wiki explains:

Notably, the Madonna is still portrayed larger in size than the human figures, as tradition in the medieval painting. However, the plastic rendering of the figure, inspired by Masaccio, and the perspective study, inspired by Brunelleschi, are plainly Renaissance.

Perhaps the giant female protector is making a comeback after a 500 year hiatus?


Cliff Notes

Right now, Cliff Kuang is my favourite guy online. This guy has everything. Art, Technology, Culture. He has a ton of articles in Fast Company, but also on Good and occassionally in Wired (and apparently Popular Science, Nylon and Print, but there is only so much I can read). He has articles on cool art exhibits, design, technology, and the environment.



Here are all his articles on Fast Company and on Good.

Plus, I love his blog: Delicious Ghost (that also has other contributors).


MEN @ Kampnagel

Awhile back I posted about the new remix group with two members from Le Tigre: MEN. I was pretty pumped to see them in concert in Hamburg a couple weeks ago (yes, my response time is slow). Apparently JD Samson- who I am developing a major crush on- is the only former tiger remaining.

The Concert was part of a Girl Monster night at Kampnagel in Hamburg. Girl Monster is basically a hisstory project of girl groups including releases, events and a zine. The series of events at Kampnagel are curated by Chicks on Speed. The theme of the evening was "Are you a boy or a girl?" and began with a series of videos. My favourite was Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Cone (2005), and this was another cool one by Tara Mateik: PYT:




Next came a performance, albeit short, by Ginger Brooks Takahashi. She demonstrated how to make and use flogs from recycled bicycle inner tubes and brough a giant bag for give-a-ways. Here's a pix of JD Samson looking on:



It was a good idea, but the problem is that inner tubes have grease on the inside and when you cut them, that makes for a nasty experience. Bonus points for trying to engage the audience but unfortunately the Hamburgers weren't having any of it.

This was followed by a lecture from Vaginal Davis, who is apparently now residing in Berlin. It's hard to describe exactly what she was doing, so just check out this video:


I was was pretty excited to see Davis but wasn't so amazed by the performance. MEN, however, were amazing. They closed the show with their fifth ever live performance and played only original material. Here is a clip of the preamble by JD Samson. I was enjoying the show too much to bother taping any of it- sorry! MEN are now on tour through July (and likely coming to a city near you! check out their mySpace).



Overall, a mixed-bag of queer gender-bending performances that delivered as promised. The Girl Monster series continues in May and then resumes next season at Kampnagel.


6.5.09

On the Charts

I am totally rising in popularity! Among male asian americans.