Showing papers by "Declan Butler published in 2007"

Data sharing threatens privacy

Abstract: acquitted four doctors and a US blood products company of criminal negligence in the case of four haemophiliacs who were infected with HIV after receiving transfusions of tainted blood in the 1980s. After a five-year police investigation and a lengthy trial that involved more than 100 witnesses and 1,000 exhibits, Judge Mary Lou Benotto of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto effectively said that the doctors and the company were not only acquitted but fully exonerated. “The allegations of criminal conduct on the part of these men and this corporation were not only unsupported by the evidence, they were disproved,” Benotto wrote in her 1 October decision. “The events here were tragic. However, to assign blame where none exists is to compound the tragedy.” The case is the latest of numerous global investigations into the circumstances in which thousands of patients were given infected blood even after it became known, in autumn 1984, that heat treatment killed HIV in blood products. More than 1,000 Canadians, about 700 of them with haemophilia, were infected by HIV from transfusions, almost all of them before mid-1985. The Canadian court case Doctors not to blame over HIV infection by tainted blood When web provider AOL’s research division published an analysis of search behaviour on the Internet last year, it had what it thought was a bright idea: it would reach out to academics by making an anonymized version of the data freely available for download from its website. But within hours, it had to pull the site, after bloggers managed to infer many identities from the data and view the associated search histories. AOL’s mistake highlights a growing dilemma for the social sciences. The hottest growth area in the field is computational social science. This is often based on privileged access to electronic data sets such as e-mail records, mobile-phone call logs and web-search histories of millions of individuals. Such studies are ushering in a revolution in the social sciences, specialists say. But there is a trade-off between the scientific interest in working with such data and concerns about privacy. “It’s a huge issue,” says David Lazer, a researcher at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Lazer is co-author of a social-network analysis based on the largest mobile-phone data set ever studied by academics — 18 weeks of details of who called whom, when and for how long, among 7 million users, representing 20% of the population of an unidentified European country, supplied by an unnamed operator. A month after it appeared, Microsoft researchers published an even larger study, this time of instant messages, featuring 30 billion conversations among 240 million people worldwide. Until now, social science has struggled to obtain tools that do more than scratch the surface of some of its questions. These range from identifying the driving forces behind violence, to the factors influencing how ideas, attitudes and prejudices spread through human populations. The available tools have largely remained in a time warp, consisting of analyses of national censuses, small-scale surveys, or lone researchers with a notebook observing interactions within small groups. Being able to automatically and remotely obtain such massive amounts of continuous data opens up unprecedented opportunities for social scientists to study organizations and entire communities or populations, says Marshall Van Alstyne, a researcher at Boston University. He is conducting research on the dynamics and productivity of organizations by analysing network patterns of e-mails among volunteers. “There is enormous potential here for lines of research that shed new light on basic socialscience questions,” says Jon Kleinberg, a specialist in network analysis at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. But the privacy issue looms large. Repetition of the AOL gaffe by other researchers might create a damaging public backlash, warns Myron Gutmann, director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The consortium acts as a clearinghouse for secure access to conventional sensitive social-science data sets, such as the raw data of the US national census. “So far, researchers have been careful, and successful at avoiding serious problems,” says Kleinberg. “But as the number of these types of study increases, the community is clearly going to need to engage in deeper discussions about the right way to safeguard privacy in working with these kinds of data.” Lazer says the mobile-phone study was possible only after taking many precautions, including anonymizing data before researchers gained access to them, confidentiality agreements between the phone company and Harvard University, and approval and stipulations on access controls by the university’s internal review board. But those ad hoc arrangements can go only so far, says Lazer, and a larger institutional framework is needed to set best practices, especially for safe sharing of data among academics. The social scientists pioneering such research often have computer-science backgrounds. As the software tools developed go mainstream, they get taken up by academics with less expertise in protecting data from abuse. Although AOL had anonymized the data it released — 20 million web queries from around Data sharing threatens privacy

Energy efficiency: super savers: meters to manage the future.

Abstract: Energy efficiency is one of the least flashy but most promising ways to cut carbon dioxide emissions. In the first of two features, Declan Butler explores the energy-saving possibilities of an intelligent electrical grid. In the second, Zoe Corbyn looks at how labs can cut their energy use.

Fridges could save power for a rainy day

Abstract: Turning off cold storage could buffer the electricity grid.

Q&A: Siti Fadilah Supari

Abstract: Indonesia has been hit by more human deaths from the H5N1 bird-flu virus than any other country, yet it refuses to share its virus samples with the World Health Organization (WHO). Declan Butler talks to Indonesia's health minister.

The race to wire up the poor

Abstract: Laptop Per Child’ (OLPC) scheme inspires or infuriates according to taste. The idea of revolutionizing education by distributing millions of ‘$100 laptops’ to children in the world’s poorest countries can be seen as Soviet-style social engineering or as visionary California dreaming, mass empowerment or pointless frivolity. However you see it, though, the project is facing real problems — and competition. Negroponte, who founded the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and heads the non-profit OLPC Foundation, admitted last week that in the near term the laptops will cost not US$100, but at least $175. And although he is still confident that the first 3 million machines will be shipped by the end of 2007, an earlier estimate for the same timeframe was 10 million. Meanwhile, as PC markets in industrialized nations become saturated, Intel, Microsoft, and other computer companies are turning their sights on developing countries, hoping to find the next billion computer users. “We are at the most critical stage of OLPC’s life,” Negroponte told a meeting with industry analysts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 26 April. “A year and a half ago, we were selling a dream, but it’s easy to sell dreams if you’re passionate and can share that passion with other people. But that was dreams, and now we have got to launch.”

Darfur lake is a 'mirage'.

Abstract: \"Water find may end Darfur war,\" proclaimed headlines last week, describing a claim by researchers at Boston University in Massachusetts to have identified the site of an ancient lake in northern Darfur that could imply extensive groundwater reserves. But geologists speaking to Nature dismissed the hype, pointing out that the lake dried up thousands of years ago and that it will not necessarily be surrounded by aquifers holding ancient water. Furthermore, they say that the lake was identified in the 1800s, and that its size and shape were detailed over a decade ago.

The petaflop challenge.

Abstract: IBM’s announcement on 26 June that it was about to smash the ‘petaflop’ speed barrier could herald a new era in computing. But unless the research and computing communities get their programming act together, they risk having few scientific applications that can take advantage of this huge increase in power, say experts. Called Blue Gene/P, the first of the new highpowered computers should be operational next year, and IBM has already lined up potential customers in the United States, Germany and Britain. The largest planned configuration for the machines would run continually at 1,000 trillion floating point operations per second, or teraflops, and be capable of peak speeds of up to 3,000 teraflops (3 petaflops). That would make it between three and ten times faster than the machine that tops the latest TOP500 list of supercomputers, the IBM Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which peaks at 360 teraflops. “I’m very excited,” says Ray Bair, head of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which has worked with IBM on developing the Blue Gene/P, and which will host a version of the hardware. “We’re crossing a threshold,” Bair adds, claiming that the increased power will at last allow researchers to build and run models in the way they have always wanted. At prices of around $100 a gigaflop, petaflop computers will start off in the $100-million range. A great deal of the added speed that money will buy simply comes from more processors. Supercomputer designers began taking parallel processing seriously in the 1990s, but few machines have been designed to work with more than 10,000 processors. In 2005, Blue Gene/L, which is almost three times as fast as its nearest competition, marked a significant step up with 131,072 processors. A 3-petaflop Blue Gene/P will boast 884,736 — a multitude that brings with it problems as well as promise. The rapid recent growth in supercomputing power — Blue Gene/L is as powerful as the whole of 2002’s TOP500 list combined — has come mostly from increases in the performance of the computer’s component processors. But a few years ago that process “came to a grinding halt”, says Jim Sexton, head of Blue Gene applications at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. As the processors got faster and faster, they began suffering from disproportionate increases in power consumption and heat output. To combat this, chipmakers made a historic switch. Since 2004, they have concentrated on increasing the number of processors on a chip, allowing the speed at which individual processors operate to plateau. So the dual and quad chips now common in laptops, offering two or four processors, may well be upgraded to 128 or 256 cores by 2015. This means that the cheap Linux supercomputing clusters common in universities would have hundreds of thousands of processors, and dedicated supercomputers might have hundreds of millions. The processors will not necessarily be blazingly fast — Blue Gene/P’s 850-MHz chips are little faster than a Pentium III from 1999. But with their numerical advantage they won’t have to be. This new reliance on parallel processing for increased performance means that companies from Microsoft to Nintendo will have to rethink their software — and so will scientists. A few scientific applications fall into the favoured subset called ‘embarrassingly parallel problems’. Genome analysis using BLAST software to compare sequences and mass spectroscopy for proteomics are generally fairly easy to parallelize, says Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. Each processor can take on a specific task without much reference to what all the others are doing. But other sorts of problem, in which many of the calculations depend on other calculations being done elsewhere, are not so tractable. For the moderate levels of parallelism seen to date, it is possible to get by with the current practice of writing code, and designing models, in terms of linear sequences of instructions and then parallelizing once satisfied. To get the most out of massive parallel clusters and machines, that will no longer be an option. “Coding models running across as many as a million processors is a new challenge we have to meet,” says Tim Palmer of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, who is interested in petaflop machines for climate modelling. “We have no choice but to follow the hardware trends.” Scientists need to shift to thinking in parallel from the outset, designing hypotheses and code accordingly, says Horst Simon, associate lab director for computing at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California. He describes what is needed as nothing short of a “revolution in scientific programming”. Such a revolution has been brewing for decades, but there hasn’t been much storming of the barricades. “The high-performance computing community has been working on the parallel-programming problem for over 25 years. And frankly, we don’t have much to show for it,” wrote Intel researcher Timothy Mattson on his company’s research blog last week. “On the software front, it’s chaos.” “The scientific community is not very good at software development.” IB M

Joan of Arc's relics exposed as forgery

Abstract: PARIS The relics of St Joan of Arc are not the remains of the fifteenth-century French heroine after all, according to European experts who have analysed the sacred scraps. Instead, they say the relics are a forgery, made from the remains of an Egyptian mummy. Joan was burned at the stake in 1431 in Rouen, Normandy. The relics were discovered in 1867 in a jar in the attic of a Paris pharmacy, with the inscription “Remains found under the stake of Joan of Arc, virgin of Orleans”. They were recognized by the Church, and are now housed in a museum in Chinon that belongs to the Archdiocese of Tours. Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Garches, near Paris, obtained permission to study the relics from the French church last year. He says he was “astonished” by the results. “I’d never have thought that it could be from a mummy.” Charlier and his colleagues didn’t have much to work with: the relics comprise a charredlooking human rib, chunks of what seem to be carbonized wood, a 15-centimetre fragment of linen and a cat femur — consistent with the medieval practice of throwing black cats onto the pyre of supposed witches.

Circumcision for HIV needs follow-up.

Abstract: an independent government advisory body on AIDS issues, last week urged prudence in implementing male-circumcision programmes to reduce the spread of HIV. It cautioned that over-zealous roll out could lead to a false sense of security and exacerbate the problem. In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) endorsed the promotion of male circumcision as a tool for HIV prevention, alongside condoms and antiretroviral drugs. The move was based on a WHO expert consultation, which concluded that the evidence for the intervention’s efficacy was “compelling”. Recent criticism of this view has been received with anger (see ‘Cutting criticism’). The strongest evidence comes from three recent studies. In 2005, a study of 3,300 heterosexual men living in and around Orange Farm, South Africa, by France’s National AIDS Research Agency, showed that circumcising men reduced the risk of infection by 60%. Similar levels of protection were found in 2007 by American-funded studies in Kisumu, Kenya, and Rakai, Uganda. Taken together with results from observational studies, this is “as convincing evidence as one ever gets in public health,” says Helen Weiss, a statistical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. But questions remain about the intervention’s applicability as a preventative tool on a large scale, says Willy Rozenbaum of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who led the CNS study. Rozenbaum questions the speed with which the WHO has acted, and thinks the organization’s endorsement — although detailing the caveats — has been misunderstood in some quarters as saying circumcision is a “miracle solution”. Rozenbaum notes that the effect of circumcision on HIV prevalence in a population will depend on a host of social and cultural factors. There is a real risk, he says, that after circumcision men may have a false sense of security and increase their number of partners, or dispense with condoms. The report also points out that circumcision leaves men more vulnerable to Circumcision for HIV needs follow-up

Earth monitoring: the planetary panopticon.

Abstract: Technology will soon allow the world to be mapped in near-real time and at high resolution. Declan Butler investigates the potential for operational monitoring of the planet.

Solar power: California's latest gold rush.

Abstract: Green-energy companies are enjoying a boom in investment. But will they live up to expectation, asks Declan Butler.

Europe condemns Libyan trial verdict

Abstract: (EU) on 1 January will allow it to apply ever-greater international pressure in the political row over the fate of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor condemned to death in Libya last month. The six medical workers were sentenced to death on 19 December by the Benghazi Criminal Court for deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998. Scientists around the world have argued that medical evidence shows unequivocally that the people were not infected deliberately. They point out that the outbreak was a typical example of what can go wrong when hospital equipment and supplies become contaminated — as happened in a hospital in Kazakhstan, where more than 80 children were infected with HIV last summer. The team defending the medi cal workers says that it will appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court in Libya. By law, this must be done within 60 days of the verdict. The Supreme Council for Judicial Authority could also annul the death sentences. The council, which makes judicial appointments, is an interface between Libya's supposedly separated executive and judiciary authorities. Although the strongest criticism of the verdict came from Bulgaria itself, both the EU and Germany, which holds the EU's presidency for the first half of 2007, forcefully condemned the sentences. Bulgaria's new status as an EU member state seems to ensure that this pressure will not slacken. \" We simply cannot accept this verdict, \" says Benita Fer-rero-Waldner, the European Commission's foreign minister. In a letter to the Libyan foreign ministry she pointed to the \" recent publication of a strong body of scientific evidence concerning the origin and timing of the Benghazi infection…I very much regret that this new element was not deemed worth considering in the legal proceedings thus far and hope it will be duly taken into consideration by the Supreme Court. \" German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the verdict as a \" terrible ruling \" ; Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, said that the EU would \" continue to exert pressure under the German presidency so that Libya doesn't only take part in a solution but ultimately brings about a solution \". This toughened attitude contrasts sharply with that shown by the United States. President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed only \" disappointment \" , and have avoided any discussion of a fair trial …

Rebels hold their own in journal price war

Abstract: Elsevier journal Topology quit in a row over pricing. Now they are setting up a non-profit competitor to be published by the London Mathematical Society. The Journal of Topology, announced last week, will launch next January and will cost US$570 per year, compared with Topology’s $1,665. It’s not the first such move. Over the past eight years, around a dozen cheap or openaccess journals have been created to compete directly with an expensive commercial journal, many by editorial boards that had quit the original publication in protest. So, do the cheaper journals fare better than their rivals? As far as scientific credibility is concerned, the answer is often yes — many of the challengers have obtained impact factors (a measure of the citations its papers receive) higher than their competitor. For example, the Journal of Machine Learning Research, set up in 2001 by editors of Springer’s Machine Learning, has a 2005 impact factor of 4.027. “That’s the highest in artificial intelligence, automation and control, and ninth in all of computer science,” says Leslie Pack Kaelbling, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the journal’s editor-in-chief. Machine Learning has a 2005 impact factor of just 3.1. One of the first defections was Evolutionary Ecology Research, set up in 1999 by Michael Rosenzweig, a researcher at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He defected, along with the entire editorial board, from Evolutionary Ecology, then published by Wolters Kluwer. Rosenzweig had established the journal in 1987, but became disillusioned with price increases. The new journal has survived, with the online version getting up to 80,000 page views a month and a 50% increase in its number of pages, says Rosenzweig. He says the journal pioneered the idea of allowing libraries to subscribe only to an electronic version. Although its impact factor of 1.61 lags behind Evolutionary Ecology’s 1.77, he dismisses this as unimportant: “Impact factors are toxic for science and the journals that serve it.” Like many of the rebel journals, Evolutionary Ecology Research was set up with help from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), which fosters greater access to the literature. Joan Birman of Columbia University in New York is on the editorial board of Geometry and Topology, another SPARC-supported journal. She says it “has done better than we could have dreamed”. But despite scholarly success, the journals often get poor support from libraries. “Libraries have not given us anything like the support, via subscriptions, that mathematicians have given us via submissions,” says Birman. “Subscriptions have been an uphill battle. Our journals are self-supporting, but just barely so.” ■

Modellers seek reason for low retraction rates

Abstract: agree on an action plan to deal with indoor air pollution — the range of hazards related to cooking indoors that is thought to kill more people every year in poor countries than malaria. Despite two weeks of negotiations in New York, the UN Commission on Sustainable Development was unable to ratify a draft communiqué on indoor pollution and other developmental issues that were up for discussion. But activists say the very fact that the discussion took place represents valuable progress in acknowledging the scale of the pollution problem. At the end of a fractious meeting that culminated in the election of the Zimbabwean environment minister, Francis Nhema, to chair the commission, representatives from Switzerland and the European Union (EU) rejected the draft communiqué, saying that its vacuous content would threaten past agreements and contained no goals that would spur action on a number of key issues. “In previous discussions, the problem of indoor air pollution has been basically invisible, perhaps because it is a situation that affects mainly women,” says Maria Arce Moreira, a policy adviser to Practical Action, a British pressure group that works on poverty issues. “It’s important that it is finally recognized as a problem, but the proposed actions to deal with it are not enough.” Around half of the world’s population cooks on stoves that burn biomass such as wood, crop residues or dung, development specialists say. According to estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), smoke emitted by traditional cookers kills 1.6 million people each year, most of them women and children (WHO Indoor Air Pollution: National Burden of Disease Estimates; 2007). Researchers predict that if these trends continue, in Africa alone indoor air pollution will kill 10 million people by 2030. Of these deaths, up to 3.7 million could be saved by switching to petroleum-based fossil fuels such as kerosene (R. Bailis et al. Science 308, 98–103; 2005). Lung cancer, pneumonia and acute lowerrespiratory infections are prevalent as a result of constant exposure to carbon monoxide, particulates, hydrocarbons and carcinogens such as formaldehyde and benzene that are contained in cooking smoke. Activist groups, including Practical Action, have previously called on governments to adopt firm measures to halve the number of people cooking with traditional fuels. But with fossil-fuel prices at historic highs, and most of the world’s poorest people using wood-burning stoves, there is little appetite for such measures. Nonetheless, EU representatives wanted the UN commission to ask nations and regions to set appropriate targets, “because without targets you cannot easily review these issues”, says Natascha Beinker, a policy adviser at the

French universities to gain control.

Abstract: “In the race against Stanford, Cambridge or Harvard, French universities run with their laces tied together and a backpack full of stones.” So said Nicolas Sarkozy in the run-up to the French presidential election, as he pledged to reform the country’s archaic university system. As the new president, Sarkozy has now personally weighed in on a reform bill that will be fasttracked through parliament this summer. The bill, adopted by the cabinet on 4 July, is historic as it would make France’s 85 public universities much more independent, largely freeing them from the current centralized state control. Sarkozy has also confirmed that universities will receive an extra €5 billion (US$ 6.8 billion) over the next five years. Most people agree that this sum, and much more, is badly needed. Whereas the élite Grandes Ecoles — which scoop the best few per cent of students — are well-heeled, the underfunded universities must cope with most of the remainder. The bill would allow universities to own and manage their own buildings, to control their budgets, and to hire and set salaries as they see fit, all of which are currently controlled by the science and higher-education ministry. At present, a star biologist might earn no more than a philosopher of the same bureaucratic grade. Top international research talent often passes French universities by. The bill would also modernize governance. University presidents have had few real powers, and whereas Anglo-Saxon universities typically form committees to headhunt the best leader, in France the presidents are elected by 130 members of the various university panels, and can serve only one four-year term. The university’s direction is decided largely by a 60-strong board of directors that is often highly politicised. Under the new law, the board would be streamlined to 20–30 people, with an absolute majority agreeing on a president. The president, elected for a maximum of two four-year terms, would have executive power over almost all university affairs. The bill is just the start of broader university reform, says prime minister François Fillon, who has described the future of French universities as the most important item on his domestic agenda. ■

Forensic science: ghost buster.

Abstract: An Italian scientist revived the hunt for the mafia's boss of bosses. Declan Butler reports.

High noon in Libya

Abstract: This week sees yet another crisis point in the Libyan case of six foreign health professionals sentenced to death on charges of injecting hundreds of children with HIV. Declan Butler traces the efforts of scientists to help establish the truth.

Can a Saudi university think freely

Abstract: Saudi Arabia might seem an unlikely spot for a vibrant new multi cultural research university. The kingdom is at or near the bottom of rankings for science and technology research and has one of the world’s worst track records on academic freedom, not to mention women’s and other human rights. Despite all this, the country’s plans for the multibillion-dollar King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have not only secured the help of a blue-ribbon advisory panel of international academics, but have them gushing with superlatives. They say it could be an entrée into academic freedom in the region when it opens in 2009. “I’m a tremendous enthusiast,” says Frank Rhodes, president emeritus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and a panel member. “It’s going to be of enormous significance for the whole Middle East and beyond.” Frank Press, president emeritus of the US National Academy of Sciences and another member of the panel, adds: “They might achieve what no one has ever done — build a world-class university in less than a generation. This could be nation-changing.” One reason for such optimism is the scale of the venture. Saudi Arabia currently invests a pittance on research — 0.25% of its GDP. The king’s donation is expected to be several billion dollars, making it one of the world’s top ten university endowments. The country will spend another US$2 billion building a vast campus town on the Red Sea coast 90 kilometres north of Jeddah and $100 million a year for ten years creating joint labs with top research groups worldwide. The graduate university will have interdisciplinary centres instead of departments and will focus on regional interests such as water and energy. Unlike Saudi Arabia’s other state-run universities, KAUST will be managed by independent trustees. Their autonomy will be guaranteed by the endowment, which will be managed abroad by a foundation claimed to be independent of Saudi control. Only a third of the 600 faculty members and 2,000 students are expected to be Saudis. “KAUST is not only a signal of interest in international partnerships, but to bring international researchers to the kingdom,” says panel member Calestous Juma, an expert in international development at Harvard University. He adds that this signifies an opening up of both science and society in the kingdom. KAUST has out sourced recruitment to top university departments worldwide, which will get cooperative deals worth millions of dollars annually in return. One appointment will be of particular interest: KAUST’s founding president, to be selected by an international committee. What if the committee chooses a woman? “The search is merit-based; if a woman is the best candidate we will have no problem with that,” says Mohammed Mulla, a university spokesman. Members of the search committee say that it may be difficult to find a woman willing to take the post, given the severe restrictions placed on women in the kingdom, but insist that if there is any interference in their choice they will resign. Reassurance on human rights was a precondition before panel members agreed to take part, says Press. “The Saudis agreed that at this university, this town, there would be no discrimination on sex, religion or ethnicity — that there would be complete freedom.” Some seasoned Middle East watchers are more wary. “The bureaucratic police state will no doubt buy the best scientific equipment and personnel that money can buy,”

Blogs to the rescue

Abstract: Proposal calls for web community to help professionals in disaster relief.