Waiting for WikiProteins

EN: I am asking myself when WikiProfessionals will launch WikiProteins. In a news post [1] ( alternatively check this ars technica article) it was claimed to be online in March 2007. At the moment the website only shows the demo video of the protein annotation wiki. It will have strong Semantic Web functionality under the hood and will be followed by similar wikis like WikiAuthors, WikiChemicals and WikiClinical. Well, that's the plan at least.

[1] Key biology databases go wiki, Nature 445, 691 (15 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/445691a; Published online 14 February 2007

23C3 media online

EN: Quick link - As announced the video and audio files of the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) are online now. Same for the official proceedings.

Citizendium launched

EN: The Citizentdium, a Wikipedia forked that was announced on the Wizard of the OS 4, is finally online. It is based on contributions of selected, known by name experts. This means the mechanism for generating high quality articles is quite close to the one of Scholarpedia ("the free peer reviewed encyclopedia written by scholars"). Not sure if they will attract enough manpower to really compete with Wikipedia.

The real danger of drugs

EN: Just a short notice. David Nutt et al. published an article [1] in The Lancet with a wholistic view on the danger of drugs including physical harm, addiction potential, and social effects. Bottom line is that some legally available substances like alcohol and tabaco are more dangerous than illegal ones like cannabis, LSD, ecstasy, if you use the proposed scale for ranking.

[1] Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse, David Nutt, Leslie A King, William Saulsbury, Colin Blakemore, The Lancet, 2007; 369:1047-1053

Google improves privacy protection

EN: Google announced a change of their privacy policy. Some months ago I mentioned a posting by fred's house with a proposal of a service named "Google Data Privacy (GDP)" (Pedro liked that idea, too). Google seems now to be aware of the community's wish of better privacy protection and will adapt their systems in the near future. From the announcement:

Unless we're legally required to retain log data for longer, we will anonymize our server logs after a limited period of time. When we implement this policy change in the coming months, we will continue to keep server log data (so that we can improve Google's services and protect them from security and other abuses)—but will make this data much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.

The first steps into the right direction. Thanks Google!

The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition

EN: Even if you are usually not interested in Metagenomics - the pure size of the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition results is impressive. The Craig Venter Institute published a collection of papers (and other media) about that was expected already for a long time ago. Seems like this huge amount of data and other technical issues were hard to handle. But now the first part of the the ocean sequencing trip analysis is out.

These samples, collected across a several-thousand km transect from the North Atlantic through the Panama Canal and ending in the South Pacific yielded an extensive dataset consisting of 7.7 million sequencing reads (6.3 billion bp).

The number of interesting biological observations and novelties is lower than expected for such a giant project (Roland once mentioned this discrepancy for metagenomic studies) but there is still much potential in the data for further analyses.

Update: The video of the press conference is online now. Pedro followed it live and blogged some comments. This publication brought up again some voices questioning the (expensive) general metagenomic method. Working with this noisy data I can tell that it is often quite a pain. But to get the big image even if it would just show us we have seen already everything we have to go that way. Hopefully improving technologies - I once mentioned single-cell sequencing combined with microfluid separation systems - will make it easier for us to explore the unknown wold out there.

Freebase - semantic web for the community

EN: This looks very promising - Freebase combines the Web 2.0 (community based data generation/maintenance) and semantic web (using meta data for making information better "understandable" for machines) philosophy in one application. It's the first child of the company Metaweb (nomen est omen) and will be Creative Commons licensed (nice!). Tim O'Really wrote a helpful introduction (that was bashed because of an "outdated view" about the semantic web). bbgm mentioned briefly the potential for science. At the moment you have to be invited to sign in, however you should keep an eye on it.

Update: Freebase has now a blog called Freebasics.

Secured computers - no SPAM

EN: O'Reilly Radar has a interesting discussion about the technologies to fight e-mail SPAM. But I am not sure if fighting SPAM alone makes the world a better place. SPAM is a symptom that shows that (1) there are too many unsecured computers connected to the net and (2) there is enough criminal energy out there that makes use of them. If the SPAM problem is solved somehow (some proposals are mentioned in the article) both points aren't solved. It might lead to an increase of other computer crimes like blackmailing companies with DDOS attacks using botnets. Crime is partly the result of missing options of legal work for the people committing the crimes, but well ... that's hard to solve. Increasing general security of computers is easier. Unfortunately the focus in most companies/communities seems to be on implementing as much features as possible while increasing complexity and reducing security.

Using an unsecured machine in the net is like driving drunk ... you don't endager only yourself but also others. My personal solution is using OpenBSD (but sure there are others ;)).