Monday, February 02, 2004

Homesteading the Noosphere Eric S. Raymond writes: To understand the role of reputation in the open-source culture, it is helpful to move from history further into anthropology and economics, and examine the difference between exchange cultures and gift cultures. Humans have an innate drive to compete for social status; it's wired in by our evolutionary history. For most human history before the invention of agriculture, our ancestors lived in small nomadic hunting-gathering bands. High-status individuals got the healthiest mates and access to the best food. This drive for status expresses itself in different ways, depending largely on the degree of scarcity of survival goods. Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity and want. Each way carries with it different ways of gaining social status. The simplest way is the command hierarchy. In command hierarchies, allocation of scarce goods is done by one central authority and backed up by force. Command hierarchies scale very poorly; they become increasingly brutal and inefficient as they get larger. For this reason, command hierarchies above the size of an extended family are almost always parasites on a larger economy of a different type. In command hierarchies, social status is primarily determined by access to coercive power. Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a sophisticated adaptation to scarcity that, unlike the command model, scales quite well. Allocation of scarce goods is done in a decentralized way through trade and voluntary cooperation (and in fact, the dominating effect of competitive desire is to produce cooperative behavior). In an exchange economy, social status is primarily determined by having control of things (not necessarily material things) to use or trade. Most people have implicit mental models for both of the above, and how they interact with each other. Government, the military, and organized crime (for example) are command hierarchies parasitic on the broader exchange economy we call 'the free market'. There's a third model, however, that is radically different from either and not generally recognized except by anthropologists; the gift culture. Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy. Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away. Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain's potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire's elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker's long hours of effort to produce high-quality open source. Examined in this way, it is quite clear that the society of open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture. Within it, there is no serious shortage of the 'survival necessities' - disk space, network bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared. This abundance creates a situation in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation among one's peers. (02/02/04) Climate Collapse: The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare David Stipp writes: Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it. The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power. Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change. Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years. (02/02/04) Understanding Infection BBC Health -- Scientists have developed a "chemical shield" which may stop patients developing infections in hospitals. University of Chicago researchers say the special coating would act as a barrier, preventing bacteria from causing infection. Bacteria usually act when they sense chemical stress messages which tell them the body is vulnerable, the researchers told Gastroenterology. The shield would stop these messages and so prevent infection, they said. Doctors currently have to rely on antibiotics to tackle infections. But the more bacteria are exposed to drugs, the more they develop resistance to them, making it harder to treat infections. Hospital-acquired infections cost the NHS an estimated £1 billion a year, and kill thousands of patients. The researchers focussed on the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria which is found in the intestines of about 3% of healthy people. However, it can lead to sepsis in the gut, which can prove fatal in patients weakened after surgery. Patients in intensive care are particularly vulnerable to infections as nutrients are delivered directly into their bloodstream instead of through their intestines. That leads to the bowel being less active, making it less able to contain the toxic effects of harmful bacteria. It also causes erosion to the protective mucus which coats the intestine. In the Chicago research, mice were infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa two days after being operated on. Some were also injected with a polymer called polyethylene glycol, which acts like the mucus in the intestine, at the time they were infected. Mice who were not treated died, But those who received the treatment did not develop an infection. The researchers suggest the polymer acts as a "shield" and prevents the chemical signals of stress from reaching the bacteria and triggering them into action. It also protects the bowel wall from the bacteria. The mice suffered no side effects after the treatment. (02/02/04) Building an Artificial Liver BBC Health -- Scientists are developing an artificial glass liver to improve understanding of how the organ works. The team, from the University of Leeds, hope their work will eventually lead to better treatments for people with liver disease. They also hope that the lessons learned will be used to engineer liver tissue to replace that damaged by disease. The first aim will be to replicate exactly the way the real organ is geometrically constructed. Once this is achieved, it should then be possible to study how the cells function within that structure. Lead researcher Dr Peter Walker said the liver was a very complex organ, which was still not fully understood. He hoped his artificial creation would begin to help solve some of the mysteries. "It may provide an alternative to animal testing for hepatic drugs and bring us one step closer to being able to engineer liver tissue." The artificial organ - to be used like a dialysis machine - will be constructed of tiny hexagonal glass plates with channels running from their edges to the centre. The minute channels - less than 1/200 of a millimetre wide - are lined with liver cells which reproduce the cleaning work of the organ. The blood flows to the edge of each hexagon and down the channels, cleaned by cells as it goes, before exiting through a central "vein". The liver is the only organ in the body where blood from veins and arteries is mixed together. The arterial blood, fresh from the lungs, provides the cells with the oxygen they need to function, while venal blood contains the impurities for the liver to clean out. Dr Walker said: "A major problem with artificial livers is that as the blood runs through, it loses too much oxygen, so cells at the end of the line are no longer effective. "Reproducing the exact layout of the liver should overcome this problem, as cells will behave as they do in the natural liver, performing different cleaning functions dependent on their position and the level of oxygen they receive." He is creating computer simulations to model the liver, so optimum channel size, flow rate and density of cells can be calculated as accurately as possible, before the artificial liver is constructed in the laboratory. (02/02/04) Learning from Nature BBC Science -- Scientists have recruited an unusual ally in their quest to produce safer, cheaper rocket fuel: bacteria. The microbes help make a key ingredient of a fuel mix used in missiles but could also reduce the cost of drugs used to lower cholesterol levels. The US military commissioned the work after discovering navy chemists were using the cheaper, but more dangerous, chemical nitroglycerine in its place. Details are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The conventional manufacture of the propellant butanetriol costs $30 (£16) to $40 (£22) per pound. Together, the Navy and Army purchase about 15,000 pounds (6,803 kg) per year. Butanetriol is used to make another chemical called butanetriol trinitrate (BTTN) which is employed in the fuel mix of missiles such as the Hellfire, an air-to-ground attack missile fired from military helicopters such as the Apache and unmanned Predator drones. ... By modifying key genes in the bacteria E. coli and Pseudomonas fragi, researchers led by Dr John Frost of Michigan State University, US, have teased the microbes into making butanetriol from simple carbohydrates obtained from corn and sugar beet. The butanetriol is then nitrated to produce BTTN, which allows the missile rocket's propellant mix to burn more evenly, similar to the way that some cigarette paper is treated. "The key aspect is simplicity, we are teaching the microbes to be chemical catalysts," said Dr Frost. "At the moment we are using two bacteria, but the goal is to refine the process to just one step. Microbes allow you to deal in large volumes, which make the process commercially viable. "Compared with nitroglycerine, which is pretty unforgiving stuff, the BTTN is safer in all aspects of manufacture and use." (02/02/04) Spirit: Up and Running BBC Science -- Nasa's Mars rover Spirit is "healthy" again for the first time since it stopped working properly 10 days ago. The US space agency said its engineers had carried out recovery work on the robot's troubled flash memory system. Spirit, which landed on Mars on 4 January, will now complete its study of the Red Planet's soil and rocks. With the twin rover Opportunity also on the planet, Nasa said it was the first time in history that two mobile robots were exploring Mars at the same time. "We have confirmed that Spirit is booting up normally. Tomorrow we'll be doing some preventative maintenance," said Dr Mark Adler of Nasa. The agency said its engineers were able to repair Spirit by deleting thousands of files - many left over from its seven-month flight to Mars - from its flash memory. Onboard software had problems managing the flash memory, which retains information even when the power is off. This triggered Spirit's computer to reset itself about once an hour, the agency added. Engineers managed to put Spirit into an operations mode that avoided use of flash memory and this enabled the computer to stabilise. "To be safe, we want to reformat the flash and start again with a clean slate," Dr Adler said. The reformatting is planned for Monday and will delete everything in the flash file system and install a clean version of the flight software. (02/02/04) 6:12:45 AM

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