A limit on how many buddies you can have in iChat. According to a new Apple Knowledge Base article, due to apparent limitations in the AOL chat server software, you can only store 150 buddy names in your iChat buddy list. [Mac Net Journal]

Well, since there is a lot of data that a human can only keep track of a social network of about 150 people, this makes sense ;-)  10:33:49 PM    

Fair use. The concept of fair use seems to be coming under debate lately. In one ear is Jon Udell, encouraging us to ease information out of its stultifying prison, while in the other ear Mark Pilgrim and commentators are rightly pointing out that the accompanying Terms and Conditions are still the rules that determine what you can do with that data, however foolish and restrictive they may be.... [HubLog]

Some very tough questions asked here. The answers will be extremely important and, to my mind, inevitable. The difficulty comes in predicting how long that takes and how much damage (e.g. economically) is done before that happens.  10:27:44 PM    

Host gene that makes people vulnerable to leprosy discovered [EurekAlert!]

I wish the release had more information about the gene itself. The decreasing prevalence of leprosy in the world has suggested that genetic factors were important. It will be interesting to see what the gene does. I would not be surprised if it is involved in the immune system.  10:21:40 PM    

Latent Semantic Indexing. Maciej Ceglowski is full of ideas on how [Latent Semantic Indexing] can be used: "It's good on large collections of text, written in a formal style: libraries of academic research, for example," he says. Biology, he points out, can benefit massively from LSI. The SVD algorithm doesn't actually require text at all. There is no language understanding, just a count of word frequency. If you take mass spectrographs of complex molecules, and treat each molecule as a document, and each peak on the spectrograph as a word, you can build searchable indexes in just the same way you can with text. This could be revolutionary for medical science. By posting an entire text document into the search box, an LSI system will give you back a list of similar documents: a sort of "More Like This" search. While for text this is useful, it becomes revolutionary when applied to proteins. From a database of thousands of molecules, you can use LSI to find similar matches. You can find clusters - places on the matrix where the molecules are similar - and you might even find similarities you didn't know about. [via Ben Hammersley.com] And they never even mentioned DNA codons... [HubLog]

I've heard about LSI 3 times in the last week. I have to track down what all the buzz is.  10:18:21 PM    

The Internet Might Just Save The Planet. After a few days of really pessimistic articles about how difficult it is to find jobs and how cyberterrorism is going to destroy the internet, here's a nice optimistic article about how the internet really has changed the way we live. The main point is that the internet allows "hypercommunication" that lets people to do things they've never done before, opening up opportunities. The logical leap could use a little more backup, but the writer believes this will lead to a more environmentally friendly world because goods are more customized (less likely to be thrown out as quickly) and we have the ability to sell or buy older goods to others who might want them (instead of just sending them to the local garbage dump). [Techdirt]

I love optimistic articles.  10:02:08 PM    

"Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" [Daypop Top 40]

Greatt article talking about power logs, what they are and how they differ from bell curves. This is an extremely useful discussion since most major media outlest do a lousy job explaining this, usually hyping it incorrectly.  10:01:21 PM