In short, we’re being played, peeps. A small number of very wealthy folks have rigged the system in their favor and trashed the economy in the process. The amazing thing is how thoroughly they’ve convinced the middle class to support them as they’ve smashed up the family china. They have only a few votes, and their power rests ultimately in their ability to buy and bully ours.

Sadly, a culture that values sound bites more than data and rational discussion is ripe for this kind of abuse. It’s probably no accident that these people are so intent of gutting our schools, as it just serves their short term goals. Ultimately, though, they need a solid middle class to buy their toys, so this can’t be a good long-term strategy for anyone.

Always so nice to hear sense spoken in Congress. Repubs force a vote to break a filibuster on a nominee that then passes 99-0?!? This isn’t principle or debate, it’s just nonsense, and it really needs to stop.

Some furniture in need of attention

To whit: A few days ago, I was on campus just as the football team (who come to campus early) was leaving after breakfast. While most of the team headed towards the halls, a group of four were walking abreast towards us, occupying almost all of the one lane road.

And one was sporting a shirt sharing the assurrance

Don’t worry – I’ll pull out

Charmed.

I’m sure.

As Jess Larson has observed, university students are a bit like unfinished furniture. While some really just need some sanding and finish, others have major structural issues. I’m thinking that wandering campus displaying openly misogynist sentiments probably falls in the latter category.

Sigh.

I should make it clear that our students are generally very cool, & most of the guys are quite non-obnoxious. The unusual nature of this example of oafishness makes it all the more depressing & frustrating. I also don’t want to paint all our football players or student athletes with this brush; our athletes also tend to be very together peeps. Teams (& other groups) do need to be aware, however, that when they’re together in a context that identifies them as The Team, people are prone to overgeneralization. Know thyselves, folks; it’s in your own best interest.

Rosalind Franklin on hiking trip in the Alps. Image from the National Library of Medicine's Profiles in Science project.

Today, 24 March, is Ada Lovelace Day, honoring the remarkable woman that is arguably the first computer programmer, working a full century before the construction of the first electronic machines that we would typically recognize as modern computers. In honor of her work and the crucial but typically underreported contributions of women in technology, over 1,700 are writing today “about a woman in technology whom I admire”. This is my contribution.

When Charles Darwin published his landmark Origin of species 150 years ago, he played a critical role in transforming biology from an exercise in bug collecting and guesswork to a science, with testable hypotheses that could give meaning to all the data people were collecting in the field, and tie down some of the more wild-eyed speculations. One of the huge holes (a gap Darwin freely acknowledged) was the how of inheritance. That inheritance existed was empirically obvious, but the mechanism by which it occurred was a complete mystery. In subsequent years, the work of Mendel and others shed crucial light on the properties of that mechanism, but still left open the key question of how exactly it happened.

This puzzle was solved in the 1950′s, with a central breakthrough being the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. The fact that DNA is composed of two strands bound together, each carrying essentially the same information, meant that it can be split and copied, allowed the genetic code to be copied and transmitted from one cell to another in cell division, and ultimately from one individual to another in reproduction.

It is hard to overstate the impact of this achievement, which totally revolutionized the methods and approach of biology, ultimately leading to modern molecular biology, gene sequencing (including the Human Genome Project), reconstruction of phylogenetic trees, gene therapies, genetically modified organisms, and new medical diagnostic tools. All of this depends crucially on the discovery of the role and structure of DNA, firmly placing those discoveries among the most important of modern science.

But who then do we credit for this remarkable achievement? The names that readily come to mind are Watson and Crick, that dynamic duo at Cambridge immortalized in Watson’s The double helix (I recommend the Norton Critical Edition). If one looks to the Nobel Committee for guidance, a less well known name is added to those of Watson and Crick: Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins worked at King’s College London, where empirical data was collected that was vital to Watson and Crick’s ability to build the celebrated double helix model. The three were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material”.

Missing from this pantheon, however, is Rosalind Franklin: the person who painstakingly collected and analyzed that empirical data, including X-ray crystallography described by J. D. Bernal as “among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance every taken”. It was her methodical study of DNA (which was already widely believed to be crucial in the transmission of genetic information due to the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment) that led to the key insights into DNA’s structure. She herself understood well in advance of Watson and Crick’s breakthrough that what she called the B Form of DNA almost certainly had a double helix structure, but chose to complete her analysis of the A Form (where there was still uncertainty regarding the structure) before engaging in what she considered the speculative business of building models before all the data was in.

Yet while she methodically collected and studied, the impatient boys up the road gained indirect access to her images and measurements, data that was crucial to their model building, apparently without Franklin every knowing how much they’d obtained, and how important it had been. Franklin worked under Wilkins at King’s but was barely on speaking terms with him, and there is no evidence that she knew that Wilkins had shared some of her key data with Watson, or that a UK Medical Research Council review process gave Watson indirect access to detailed summaries of her work. Her untimely death five years later due to cancer was almost a decade before Watson’s book first publicly discussed the back channels he’d used to access her data. It seems likely, then, that she never fully understood how important her own work was to their achievements, and Watson’s deprecating portrayal of Franklin both as a person and as a scientist in his book did little to improve her reputation.

In fact, however, Franklin was clearly a gifted and dedicated scientist who made numerous valuable contributions in her short life in areas such the structure of coals, the structure of viruses, and the structure of DNA. Her work on DNA, for example, included the design and application of new imaging equipment, the collection of numerous of images from different angles, and the laborious hand calculations needed to extract quantitative measurements from those images. At the time of Watson and Crick’s famous model building, Franklin was trying to finish up her work at King’s so she could start a new position at Birkbeck, a move already delayed several months. Would she have developed the double helix model on her own if she’d been better supported at King’s, less distracted by the move? We’ll never know. It is clear, however, that her data was vital to Watson and Crick’s success, providing the empirical foundation for their theoretical leap.

Why, then, was she not recognized by the Nobel committee in 1962, alongside Watson, Crick, and Wilkins? The short, simple answer is that she was dead by then, and there are no posthumous Nobel Prizes. Less clear, though, is whether she would have gotten the award if she’d still been alive. As well as prohibiting posthumous awards, the Nobel rules also limit the number of co-recipients to three, and Watson, Crick, and Wilkins formed a full set. It would be pretty hard to justify bumping either Watson or Crick from the podium, since their paper contained the key theoretical breakthrough and would likely have the most significant long-term impact. Wilkins, on the other hand, was a different matter. He’d done little to contribute to Franklin’s work, and his own work had been far less significant to Watson and Crick’s insight. He was, however, her boss and a senior scientist, while she was effectively just a scientific hired hand at King’s, serving a two year position and moving on. And, of course, she was a woman, and the Nobels have not been kind to women, especially in the sciences. We can obviously never know what would have happened had she still been alive in 1962, but it seems naive to feel any certainty that she would have been recognized in Stockholm if she had lived.

For people looking to learn more there’s lots on-line, with all the associated pros and cons. Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The dark lady of DNA is a very nice biography and certainly helped a great deal in writing this. The epilogue to that work makes a nice antidote to the not entirely convincing epilogue to Watson’s The double helix.

Rosalind Franklin at the microscope. Image from the National Library of Medicine's Profiles in Science project.

The robots.txt file the Bush administration set up for Whitehouse.gov ran to almost 2377 lines and thereby stopped search engines logging a lot of the data found on the site.

On the first day of the Barack administration the robots.txt file shrunk to two lines allowing, for the moment, search sites to index everything it contains.

The new media team also created a Whitehouse.gov blog that will act as an informal record of events, speeches and decisions.

Combine this with the cool use of Creative Commons licensing on WhiteHouse.gov, plans to close Guantanamo, and smart, competent non-creepy people in is cabinet, and things are already a ton better.

I realize this hasn’t gotten us out of Iraq or created a million new jobs yet, but these are great steps at the beginning of a long journey.

Huzzah!

Now let’s get to work, folks.

You know what this means right? It means that there are 14 year olds that are more connected than our president is currently.

Not to mention 8 and 10 year olds.

Yup, this whole no-e-mail thing seems pretty messed up. You’d think that the full resources of the United States ought to be able to do better than sending the poor fellow into the IT stone age as his reward for being elected to the highest office in the land. What I’d really rather see is some of that “Yes we can” attitude applied to this problem, both because I think it makes sense for the way that Obama works and because it has the potential to improve the security and sensibility of everyone’s IT usage.

At the moment, for example, most people’s use of e-mail is pretty haphazard and insecure. Almost no one is using digital signatures, so forging e-mail is all too easy, which then makes certain kinds of phishing scams far easier to perpetrate. Widespread use of a proper signature system would in fact make large quantities of e-mail spam trivial to identify, as messages that didn’t bear a certified signature could be discarded without further consideration. Similarly, there are quality (if greatly underused) tools that allow us to encrypt important e-mails in such a way that they can’t be (easily) read by anyone other than the intended recipient.

What better opportunity, then, to do better?

A politician (including a President) has many important roles, and one of those is to help inform and educate the public on matters of significance. And this isn’t a matter of elitism, it’s a simple matter of access to resources. There are lots of things that I recognize are probably “important”, but don’t have the time or resources to become expert on. One would presume that if the President labeled something as “important” whole staffs could pop into existence to study the issue, generate summary reports and recommendations, etc.

Here, then, we have a chance for Obama to say that he doesn’t want to lose his electronic tools, and bring the scientific and technological resources to bear to secure and archive those transactions as required by his office. The process itself should be transparent, as the best security is obtained through transparent use of high-quality algorithms and tools, which then means that many of the benefits of this analysis and research can be shared more widely. If, for example, the President started using digital signatures on his public messages, you can bet that all the hip kids (i.e., the people that will be running the world in 10 years) would be installing the software needed to check those signatures at warp factor 9. Then they’d start signing their messages, and the snowball would be off down the mountainside.

These sorts of technologies depend heavily on a perceived use — people aren’t going to adopt X until they perceive that enough other people are using X to make it worth their while. As a small fry, I can adopt all I want and rant ’til I’m blue, but I don’t have the necessary weight to pull much of anyone along with me. Obama, on the other hand, can have a profound influence through fairly simple actions.

This could also open up a wonderful public discussion of security in general, which impacts everything from Facebook to ATM PINs to electronic voting machines, things that are woven deep into the fabric of our social, economic, and political lives. Things that matter, but which we take for granted or ignore.

So now’s the time — likely the best time ever — to move us all forward instead of holding our newly elected President back.

Yes we can.

For me the most powerful image of the night was Obama’s and Biden’s families on the stage together after Obama’s acceptance speech in Chicago. There we saw black and white children hugging and celebrating together on stage, interacting with a comfort that would have inspired beatings, or worse, in the living memory of many who voted. These children will walk the halls of the White House, not as tourists, but as residents. These children’s lives are one giant step closer to the dream espoused in the Civil Rights Movement, in the Suffragette Movement, in the Emancipation Proclamation, and in the Declaration of Independence. These children represent our future, as do all children.

Obama was elected on the promise that he can help us make a better world for all our children. Now we all have an obligation to work with the people we elected to make good on those promises.

Thanks to the great folks that came over to watch the returns with us, and for all the friends and family that we shared this with on-line and on the phone. It was an honor to have shared this historic night with you all.

That doesn’t mean he can’t still at least one more great service for his country.

He can try to return the Republican Party to their senses. The party of Eisenhower and Lincoln has been hijacked by wingnuts who would paint me a commie wacko for believing bizarre ideas like women and blacks are people, education and science are key to the health and future of the country, genuine love and affection is a precious thing wherever we find it, the founding fathers meant it when they emphasized the separation of church and state, and the federal government has a vital role in investing in the future of the country. These aren’t radical leftist ideas – these are ideas that were the bread and butter of Eisenhower style Republicans, ideas that grow directly from the ideals laid out by the founding fathers. The Republican Party, however, has been carted off into crazy land by deeply fundamentalist, irrational, anti-competence nutjobs.

And it’s not just me that feels that way. Colin Powell is one of the most articulate and best known Republican defectors in this election, but he’s just the public face of a much bigger discontent with their party. Tonight the Republican party suffered a shattering defeat tonight on almost every front, and alarm bells must be ringing up and down conservative corridors all across the country.

I’m no Republican, I’m absolutely thrilled with the results tonight, and I’m a lot more likely to vote for a donkey than an elephant. I do, however, have a vested interest in a healthy, vigorous democracy, as do we all. And that isn’t best served by a single dominant party with only a crippled opposition party. Just as importantly, if the Republican party can be brought to its senses, it allows a much more realistic spectrum of political discussion which is vital as we face a broad array of shifting challenges.

So McCain can make yet another valuable contribution to our country. He can help fix one of the two major political parties in this country at a point where they desperately need the help. With the help of defectors like Powell he can bring together the sensible folks in his party, the people that can do basic math, balance budgets, value competence over cronyism, and focus on progress instead of division.

McCain’s concession speech was a gracious view of the man that inspired so much enthusiasm 8 years ago and across his career. I hope he can make something good out of the the bitter lessons of this election and the last eight years, and work to heal his party (although maybe not too quickly).

Both Obama and McCain have important work to do, and we all benefit if they succeed. Wish them well.

Common working people has got to take the seat
in Washington, in Washington.
And I’m gonna tell you workers
‘fore you cash in your checks
they say America first but they mean America next
in Washington, in Washington.
— Woody Guthrie, “Lindbergh”

Is it annoying if we keep wrestling with the same issues, or does it just mean they’re eternal?