Just who should be responsible for the minefield that the Internet of Things has become?

“IoT Growing Faster Than the Ability to Defend It”

The IoT is a vast and growing virtual universe that includes automobiles, medical devices, industrial systems and a growing number of consumer electronics devices. These include video game consoles, smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and connected thermostats like the Nest, not to mention the smart home hubs and network routers that connect those devices to the internet and one another.

[Scientific American, 26 October 2016]

I believe the world of IoT offers incredible opportunities for human advancement. It also has a dark shadow side. We can do amazing things with connected devices that will change the world, but connecting all these devices also lays us open to a myriad of potential dangers. We must take these dangers seriously, and even more so, we must take our responsibility to ensure IoT security seriously.

[Forbes, 26 October 2016]

Because IoT is a new field, it's dominated by companies that don't have the same mindset as the manufacturers of mission-critical servers—and that can spell trouble. "Very often, the creators of smart gadgets are small startups," says KeepSolid CTO Vasyl Diakonov, "and they don’t have resources or knowledge to build out sophisticated security."

Ben Desjardins, director of security solutions at Radware, specifically calls out the software end of the equation. "The most challenging aspect of this," he says, "is that many of the IoT devices are being manufactured by organizations that are new to software development, and are likely to have more vulnerable code and immature patch management processes."

[CSOonline, 12 October 2016], 

Hot on the heels of Internet users learning that for years the tech world has been quietly releasing onto the market an unknown number of devices of various kinds that contain serious security vulnerabilities and/or malware so that the Internet of Things (IoT) is now a minefield for the average person, we find that some in the IT world would like us to believe it is now our fault entirely if we unknowingly purchase and use one of these critically flawed products.

Dark Reading, 26 October 2016:

Imagine an Internet with multiple levels of security that users need to earn.

Someone has to clean the house, shovel the walk, and mow the lawn. As we grow to adulthood, we realize that this person is us. We either do it ourselves, or we have to earn enough to pay someone else to do it. The Internet has reached a point where we need to take responsibility for our own actions to clean it up.

Many aspects of life present this onus of individual responsibility; there are benefits when we do our part, and consequences when we don’t. Drive responsibly and you can get a discount on your car insurance. Don’t mow your lawn, and in many communities you will get billed when the municipality does it for you.

The Internet if full of opportunities for us to affect others by our actions. Unsecured computers can be used as bots for spam and denial-of-service attacks. Downloaded malware can infect other systems nearby because we are inside a trusted environment. We have tried to educate people on the importance of protecting devices, not clicking on shiny but suspicious links, and other responsible behaviors, with limited effect. What if we took a different approach?

Imagine an Internet with multiple levels of security that users need to earn. Level zero means a person does nothing, and so has limited access to services because their computer is probably infected. Many corporations work this way on their internal networks, restricting access of devices that are unknown or do not have a minimum set of security defenses. Restrictions could be based on inexperience -- akin to what many countries do with driver’s licenses -- or personal habits, which often affect life insurance premiums.

I’m sorry, but with even the government-subsidised hearing aids supplied to pensioners in Australia having a digital component which can transmit and receive, this still inchoate push to make eighty year-olds as morally or legally responsible for hacking and denial of service attacks as the manufacturers of everything from digital doorbells and cameras through to wheelchairs and mobile phones is one that should be vigorously resisted.

"Let the buyer beware" should not be used as an excuse for the technology community to continue its sometimes sloppy research, design and manufacturing processes or fail to alert the public to/correct known product security flaws.

All manufacturers and vendors need to be totally honest with consumers, draw attention to the fact that the product has a digital component, make the limitations of their devices known at point of sale and supply clear information on security/software update requirements.

This is clearly not happening across the board with the Internet of Things right now and a higher level of consumer protection is needed.

So you thought you knew everything about racial bias?

The medical fraternity discovering yet another form of racial bias – this time in the structure of its research databases.

EukekaAlert!, 11 October 2016:

A national group of researchers has confirmed for the first time that two of the top genomic databases, which are in wide use today by clinical geneticists, reflect a measurable bias toward genetic data based on European ancestry over that of African ancestry. The results were published in the latest issue of Nature Communications.

The research team was led by Timothy O'Connor, assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) and a faculty member of the school's Institute for Genomic Sciences. He is also a specialist in the areas of Human Evolutionary Genomics, Genotype/Phenotype Architecture, and Computational Biology. Other members of the study included researchers from UM SOM's Department of Medicine and the Program in Personalized and Genomic Medicine, and from the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Colorado, and the Henry Ford Health System.

This deficit in African ancestry genomic data was identified during an 18-month long study conducted under the auspices of the larger Consortium on Asthma among African-Ancestry Populations in the Americas (CAAPA). To create a benchmark for comparison to current database results, the researchers first created the largest, high-quality non-European genome data set ever assembled. Genetic samples of 642 subjects from the African diaspora, including representatives from US, African, and Afro-Caribbean populations, were sequenced in order to produce this unique data set. Then, when compared with current clinical genomic databases, researchers found a clearer preference in those databases for European genetic variants over non-European variants.

"By better understanding the important role of African ancestry in clinical genetics, we can begin to actually identify a disease that has been forgotten or is not part of an individual's self-identification," says O'Connor. "For example, if an African-American patient walks in the door, he might have 20 percent European ancestry, while another might have 20 percent African ancestry. That difference will dramatically change how many variants are found in their genome, and what disease risks they might encounter. That's why we need to expand these databases to include a broader range of ancestries, in order to produce more accurate medical genetic diagnoses."

O'Connor also points out that this shortfall in genomic data also comes at a financial cost. "If you translate the review time it takes for each one of these variants to be sequenced in terms of cost in a clinical setting, you're looking at a difference of about $1,000 more to analyze an African American's genome than a European American's genome--and you still receive less accurate results," he notes.

"This groundbreaking research by Dr. O'Connor and his team clearly underscores the need for greater diversity in today's genomic databases," says UM SOM Dean E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, who is also Vice President of Medical Affairs at the University of Maryland and the John Z. and Akiko Bowers Distinguished Professor at UM SOM. "By applying the genetic ancestry data of all major racial backgrounds, we can perform more precise and cost-effective clinical diagnoses that benefit patients and physicians alike."

Using tax offsets as a principal funding device to encourage self-assessing corporations to conduct research and development. What could possibly go wrong?

Providing a tax incentive for industry to conduct, in a scientific way, experimental activities for the purpose of generating new knowledge or information in either a general or applied form. [C’wealth Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 - SECT 355.5]

What could possibly go wrong when a federal government primarily funds business research and development (R&D) by offering private corporations tax offsets for conducting such activities, while at the same time allowing them to self-assess whether they are eligible for these tax incentives and whether their research is genuine?

Well for a start, the companies involved tend to employ less science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates to conduct their R&D.

Given that on 15 June 2016 The Australian reported that; the Productivity Commission says STEM graduates fare poorly in the job market, apart from those who have studied healthcare, mining engineering and surveying. The outlook for mathematics and computer science qualifications are only slightly below average, however there are big gaps for graduates in life sciences, chemistry and the physical sciences. Employment outcomes improve three years after graduation, but 20 per cent of people with bachelor degrees in natural and physical sciences have still not got a job. Of those who do get work, many are in an unrelated field. About a quarter of people with science degrees say their qualifications are not relevant to their employment, one has to wonder why business and industry in Australia are not availing themselves of these qualified graduates.

Then there is the fact that it appears that this government program is not always well targeted.

Another flaw in this system is that voters have no way of knowing which companies are receiving these tax incentives and how much they are receiving, or of assessing what government foregoing so much tax income annually actually achieves as outcomes for the economy.

If science actually matters to the Turnbull Government it should matter not just in universities and identified research institutes but in all its aspects – including allegedly market-driven R&D.

One has to suspect that a little more academic discipline in business research and development might lead to better outcomes.

BACKGROUND

Dept. of Industry, Innovation and Science, Review of the R&D Tax Incentive (Ferris, Finkel and Frasier) 4 April 2016:

The R&D Tax Incentive (the Incentive) is the largest component of Australian government support for innovation, with around 13,700 entities performing $19.5 billion of R&D at an estimated cost to government of $2.95 billion in 2013-14. The Government commissioned this review to:

‘identify opportunities to improve the effectiveness and integrity of the R&D Tax Incentive, including by sharpening its focus on encouraging additional R&D spending.’

Reviewing the programme against these terms of reference involves the evaluation of the programme against its objectives, weighed against the costs, to measure the net social benefit.

The objectives, as stated in the programme’s legislation, are to ‘encourage industry to conduct research and development activities that might otherwise not be conducted…to benefit the wider Australian economy’. In other words, the Incentive seeks to encourage additional R&D (additionality) that benefits others (spillovers).

Most OECD countries have incentive schemes for R&D. Australia and most other countries use tax incentives as part of their public support, but Australia, Canada and the Netherlands are unusual in having tax measures as the principal form of support for business R&D. Countries such as Finland, Germany and Sweden are examples at the other end of the spectrum, in that they do not use tax incentives at all but rather support business R&D through direct measures such as competitive grants.

Overall assessment

The review panel finds that the programme falls short of meeting its stated objectives of additionality and spillovers. There are a number of areas where improvements could be sought in order to improve the effectiveness and integrity of the programme and achieve a stronger focus on additionality.

Based on the best estimates of additionality and spillovers, the panel found that the programme could be better targeted. The areas of improvement identified in this review would be likely to generate greater benefit from the programme for the Australian economy.….

The panel notes that there is a modest amount of collaboration with publicly-funded research organisations (PFROs) within the programme, but it is not an explicit focus. The panel also notes the low employment level of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) PhD graduates in Australian industry relative to other OECD countries. This represents a lost opportunity for greater spillovers of knowledge between larger companies, PFROs and the broader marketplace…..

The panel notes that despite the level of coordination between AusIndustry and the ATO, the significant growth in the scale of the programme is placing increasing strain on the administrative and compliance model for the programme. The Government should consider options to improve administration. These could include: adopting a single application process rather than the current separation of registration and claims, introducing a single database for the entire programme, reviewing whether both AusIndustry and the ATO should continue to administer the programme jointly and closer collaboration and streamlining around review and findings. Either or both agencies may require additional resourcing to enable such improvements.

To place the programme into alignment with modern expectations and to allow public visibility of companies receiving public support for their activities, tax secrecy provisions should be adjusted to allow the publication of the names of companies claiming the Incentive and the amounts of R&D they have claimed…..

Australia: still discovering the wonders it contains

CBS NEWS 4 March 2015:

A moth with iridescent gold and purple wings that dates back to at least 40 million years ago has been discovered in Australia.

About the size of a small coin, scientists are calling Enigmatinea glatzella a living dinosaur. Using DNA analysis, an international team described their find in the journal Systematic Entomology.

It is the first time since the 1970s that a new family of primitive moths has been identified anywhere in the world.

The enigma moth lives on Kangaroo Island of South Australia's coast in Southern Cypress pine trees, a very ancient element of our flora going back to the supercontinent Gondwana. The lives of these adult moths are short. They emerge from their cocoons, mate, females lay their eggs, and then die - all in one day....

How Julia Gillard's experience inspires or discourages women to enter politics

How Gillard’s experience inspires or discourages women to enter politics

  

Does being reminded of the sexism that Julia Gillard faced as Australia’s first female prime minister challenge women to enter politics or discourage them?

“We found a polarising effect with women responding in different ways depending on their attitudes to gender roles,” said Dr Christopher Hunt, lead author of the research from the University of Sydney’s School of Psychology.

Hunt, together with the School’s Dr Karen Gonsalkorale and Dr Lisa Zadro published their findings in the European Journal of Social Psychology, last month.

“For women who hold traditional gender values - those who think that women should be modest, place their families before themselves and put a lot of importance in taking care of their home and their physical appearance - being reminded of Julia Gillard’s experiences made them want to avoid politics,” Dr Hunt said.

“However for women who rate themselves as non-conformists in regards to gender values, being reminded of Gillard’s difficulties motivated them to go into politics - she appears to be a role model for this group.”

These effects were not related to any changes in women’s belief in their ability to lead. 

“So the changes seem to be driven by thinking about how others will react to them – about the possibility of a backlash,” Dr Hunt said.

“International research shows that women in countries with more women politicians display greater interest in politics than women from countries with lower female representation. Our research suggests such role model influence changes according to women’s other beliefs and values.”

The study assessed 167 Australian undergraduate students on a measure of conformity to gender norms. They then either read statements about generic difficulties experienced by leaders or the gender-based difficulties experienced by Gillard before completing a questionnaire on their attitudes to leadership and certain occupations.

For male participants, those with high conformity to masculine norms showed a greater belief in their own leadership capabilities after reading about Gillard’s gender-based difficulties than when reading about generic difficulties, while low conforming men showed the opposite pattern.

“This suggests that Gillard’s example provoked a defensive reporting of leadership capability  -  consistent with research showing that women who succeed in traditionally male domains are often perceived to be threatening,” said Dr Hunt.

The next step in continuing this work is to see if these findings were specific to politics or whether the same findings would apply to other professions.

“It would be interesting to apply this research to the business community where research has suggested gender roles are even more strictly enforced than in politics.”

900 more science jobs forecast to go by June 2015 in Abbott's Australia

ABC Rural 26 November 2014:

The CSIRO is set to lose one staff member in five over the next two years.

The effect of the Federal Government's cut of $114 million is now becoming clearer, with at least four regional research sites under threat.

National organiser for the CSIRO Staff Association, part of the CPSU, Paul Girdler, says 878 staff are to be cut over two years, until June 2015.

"It's over 100 more than originally forecast.

"Over two years, the CSIRO is losing 21.5 per cent of its workforce, or one in five jobs.

"This new analysis demonstrates the cuts are even worse than when they were announced."

Given the cuts last year, the total tally is 1,400 jobs at the Science Organisation.

Now it includes 36 scientists in agriculture and biosecurity fields, the majority in Canberra and Southern Queensland, while 75 scientists in Mineral Resources and Energy, and 71 in Land and Water, are targetted.

Mr Girdler says the futures of regional CSIRO sites are already threatened.

"The ones we have particular concerns about (include) Griffith in the Riverina.

"CSIRO has already announced it would close by 2016. We're trying to fight to keep that site open, but we have concerns.

"Three other sites will close unless they receives additional funding. One is Atherton in north Queensland, which is Ecosystem Science research.

"And two in NSW, the Radio Astronomy sites at Narrabri and Parkes."…..

"As of this week, two thirds of the people directly affected by the 2014 announced changes have been advised of or have completed their transition.  For the remaining positions that need to be identified and discussed with staff, leaders will be talking to individuals as soon as possible to resolve uncertainty.

"I appreciate these changes have been very difficult for all and I can assure you that your leadership team is committed to supporting staff through this time of change," says Mr Roy.

UPDATE

The Age 2 December 2014:

A world-leading CSIRO chemist who was  tipped to win a Nobel prize has been made redundant.

In September, the same month San Thang was nominated as a frontrunner for the illustrious prize in chemistry, he also ceased working as a senior researcher for the national science organisation, which has been hemorrhaging staff since June last year following severe budget cuts and a restructure.

As compensation, Dr Thang, who has worked at CSIRO for almost 30 years, was given an unpaid honorary fellowship. He continues to work at his former laboratory in Clayton, mainly supervising PhD students…..

A CSIRO spokesman confirmed Dr Thang had been made redundant as part of these changes.

As a direct consequence of the federal government slashing $115 million from CSIRO's funding over four years in the May budget, the organisation is expected to lose another 400 researchers and support staff by mid next year in addition to 300 positions being cut as part of an internal restructure.

This month, the CSIRO staff association released new data showing the size and scale of the job cuts were larger than expected, reporting that 878 positions were to be cut by June 2015.

But another CSIRO spokesman said the organisation did not expect a major variation from the number of staff reductions it announced earlier this year, around 720 positions.

Disposal problems with waste water from coal-bed methane wells in the U.S.

Full article at http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Rubinstein_article_final.pdf

All my concerns about Facebook's lack of ethics coalesced on 30 June 2014.....

…when I came across this ethically challenged study by Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory and Jeffrey T. Hancock:

On Facebook, people frequently express emotions, which are later seen by their friends via Facebook's "News Feed" product (8). Because people's friends frequently produce much more content than one person can view, the News Feed filters posts, stories, and activities undertaken by friends. News Feed is the primary manner by which people see content that friends share. Which content is shown or omitted in the News Feed is determined via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging. One such test is reported in this study: A test of whether posts with emotional content are more engaging.

The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N = 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure—thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions, a form of emotional contagion. People who viewed Facebook in English were qualified for selection into the experiment. Two parallel experiments were conducted for positive and negative emotion: One in which exposure to friends' positive emotional content in their News Feed was reduced, and one in which exposure to negative emotional content in their News Feed was reduced. In these conditions, when a person loaded their News Feed, posts that contained emotional content of the relevant emotional valence, each emotional post had between a 10% and 90% chance (based on their User ID) of being omitted from their News Feed for that specific viewing. It is important to note that this content was always available by viewing a friend's content directly by going to that friend's "wall" or "timeline," rather than via the News Feed. Further, the omitted content may have appeared on prior or subsequent views of the News Feed. Finally, the experiment did not affect any direct messages sent from one user to another.

Posts were determined to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, as defined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software (LIWC2007) (9) word counting system, which correlates with self-reported and physiological measures of well-being, and has been used in prior research on emotional expression (7, 8, 10). LIWC was adapted to run on the Hadoop Map/Reduce system (11) and in the News Feed filtering system, such that no text was seen by the researchers. As such, it was consistent with Facebook's Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research. Both experiments had a control condition, in which a similar proportion of posts in their News Feed were omitted entirely at random (i.e., without respect to emotional content). Separate control conditions were necessary as 22.4% of posts contained negative words, whereas 46.8% of posts contained positive words. So for a person for whom 10% of posts containing positive content were omitted, an appropriate control would withhold 10% of 46.8% (i.e., 4.68%) of posts at random, compared with omitting only 2.24% of the News Feed in the negativity-reduced control.

The experiments took place for 1 wk (January 11–18, 2012). Participants were randomly selected based on their User ID, resulting in a total of ∼155,000 participants per condition who posted at least one status update during the experimental period….

The results show emotional contagion. As Fig. 1 illustrates, for people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people's status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks (3, 7, 8), and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network......

Unfortunately Facebook Inc does not appear to understand that involving 689,003 English-speaking people in an online psychological experiment without their knowledge, one which sought to manipulate their emotional states (and therefore their sense of wellbeing) and, then calmly and erroneously telling the world that the Data Use Policy terms and conditions imposed by the company when anyone creates a personal Facebook account was in fact "informed consent" for this experiment, is an appalling abuse of power.

That Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) facilitated this experiment is equally appalling.

 On 29 June 2014 The Wall Street Journal reported these responses:

What many of us feared is already a reality: Facebook is using us as lab rats, and not just to figure out which ads we'll respond to but actually change our emotions," wrote Animalnewyork.com, a blog post that drew attention to the study Friday morning.

"It's completely unacceptable for the terms of service to force everybody on Facebook to participate in experiments," said Kate Crawford, visiting professor at MIT's Center for Civic Media and principal researcher at Microsoft Research.

Ms. Crawford said it points to broader problem in the data science industry. Ethics are not "a major part of the education of data scientists and it clearly needs to be," she said.

Asked a Forbes.com blogger: "Is it okay for Facebook to play mind games with us for science? It's a cool finding, but manipulating unknowing users' emotional states to get there puts Facebook's big toe on that creepy line."

Slate.com called the experiment "unethical" and said "Facebook intentionally made thousands upon thousands of people sad."

Mr. Kramer defended the ethics of the project. He apologized for wording in the published study that he said might have made the experiment seem sinister. "And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect it," he wrote on Facebook.

Facebook also said the study was conducted anonymously, so researchers could not learn the names of the research subjects.

Mr. Kramer said that the content—both positive and negative—that was removed from some users' news feeds might have reappeared later.

The emotional changes in the research subjects was small. For instance, people who saw fewer positive posts only reduced the number of their own positive posts by a tenth of a percent.

Comments from Facebook users poured in Sunday evening on Mr. Kramer's Facebook page. The comments were wide-ranging, from people who had no problem with the content, to those who thought Facebook should respond by donating money to help people who struggle with mental health issues.

"I appreciate the statement," one user wrote. "But emotional manipulation is emotional manipulation, no matter how small of a sample it affected."

Perhaps Facebook users need to step back and consider what this experiment says about both the people running this giant social media platform and the staff they employ.

Do you really want Danger Muffin (left) aka Adam D. I. Kramer messing with your head just because he can?

UPDATE

The Financial Express 3 July 2014:

British regulators are investigating revelations that Facebook treated hordes of its users like laboratory rats in an experiment probing into their emotions.

The Information Commissioner's Office said Wednesday that it wants to learn more about the circumstances underlying a 2-year-old study carried out by two U.S. universities and the world's largest social network.

The inquiry is being coordinated with authorities in Ireland, where Facebook has headquarters for its European operations, as well as with French regulators.

This is just the latest in a string of incidents that have raised questions about whether the privacy rights of Facebook's nearly 1.3 billion users are being trampled by the company's drive to dissect data and promote behavior that could help sell more online advertising.

Saffin to Ferguson: "Please don't put your bib in where it's not required"

 

ABC News 22 November 2012:

 

A federal Labor backbencher is backing the coal seam gas scientists recently attacked by her own resources minister.

There have been calls for Martin Ferguson's resignation after he described the authors of a report on methane emissions as 'people who are trying to score political points without proper consideration of the best interests of the broader community'.

The federal member for Page, Janelle Saffin, says the minister was wrong to criticise the Southern Cross University researchers.

"Please don't put your bib in where it's not required," she said.

"These scientists are eminent scientists who did sound research... it's got integrity.

"Also, it was a submission to the Federal Government on fugitive emissions for goodness sake."

One in the eye for Monsanto & Co

The Australian 12 March 2010:

A SALT-RESISTANT wheat variety developed by an Australian team through old-fashioned cross-breeding rather than genetic modification is increasing crop yields by up to 25 per cent in salinity-prone areas, and could help counter food security concerns.

Researchers from Adelaide University's Waite Institute, the CSIRO and the NSW government first isolated the gene in an ancient relative of durum wheat -- used to make couscous and pasta flour -- 15 years ago.

The breakthrough was published in the international journal Nature Biotechnology overnight…..researchers had spent more than a decade using traditional cross-breeding techniques to blend the 10,000-year-old durum with its modern cousin to increase its salt resistance without genetic modification…..

Rana Munns, Richard A James &  Bo Xu, Asmini Athman, Simon J Conn, Charlotte Jordans, Caitlin S Byrt,  Ray A Hare, Stephen D Tyerman, Mark Tester, Darren Plett and Matthew Gilliham are to be congratulated for the research behind Wheat grain yield on saline soils is improved by an ancestral Na+ transporter gene in the March issue of  Nature Biotechnology (R.M., R.A.J., R.A.H., M.T., D.P. and M.G. conceived the project and planned experiments. R.M. and M.G. supervised the research. B.X. performed all Xenopus, yeast and protoplast experiments and R.A.J. performed field research. C.S.B. performed wheat genotyping. S.D.T. assisted with electrophysiology experiments. S.J.C., A.A. and C.J. performed in situ PCR and qPCR. M.G., D.P., R.A.J. and R.M. wrote the manuscript. All authors commented on the manuscript).

Dr. Rana Munns is Chief Research Scientist at the C.S.I.R.O. and began her investigations many years ago - her profile is here.
 
The C.S.I.R.O. is reported to have conducted field trials of durum wheat varieties containing new salt tolerant genes in northern NSW in 2009-10.

This is science which seeks  to improve cereal crops but does not risk contaminating wild grass populations with novel genetically modified organisms which never existed before in nature. It potentially does not have the same exploitative limitations imposed on farmers by biotech industry giants like Monsanto & Co.

As there are 12 types of groundwater flow systems contributing to dryland salinity across Australia, research into salt resistant food crops is also very relevant to national food security.

National Report by Australia on Measures Taken to Support Implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
Commonwealth Intergovernmental Working Group for the UNCCD, April 2002

So it is more than a pity that the C.S.I.R.O. is looking at an additional use for this ancient gene - adding it into the GMO research it already conducts on wheat and other food crops. [ABC AM 12 March 2012]

It appears that once an Australian scientific agency gets into bed with Monsanto it is for life.

* This post is part of North Coast Voices' effort to keep Monsanto's blog monitor (affectionately known as Mr. Monsanto) in long-term employment.

Deaths of older Australians due to climate change not considered an important public health issue?

Apparently the prospect of deaths among the elderly due to temperature increases caused by climate change carry less weight than the prospect of deaths among younger people according to Adrian Barnett - whom I'm sure did not pause to think of how his words might be received by older Australians when he participated in this media release on January 16, 2012 concerning a recently published study he co-authored with the CSIRO's Dr. Xiaoming Wang and others:

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in conjunction with CSIRO has conducted a world-first study into the potential impact climate change will have on 'years of life lost' in Brisbane.
Associate Professor Adrian Barnett of QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI) said while many other studies had examined death rates on hot and cold days, this was the first study to examine years of life lost.
"The results are startling," Professor Barnett said.
"Temperature-related deaths currently account for 6,572 years of life lost per year in Brisbane, which is more than the annual number of years of life lost to breast cancer of 3,733.
"The figure is so high because Brisbane has a very narrow comfort zone of a mean temperature between 20-25°C, on days when the temperature is above or below this range we tend to see an increase in years of life lost."
Years of life lost sums the life expectancy of all deaths according to age at death, so it gives more weight to younger deaths.
"We wanted to use years of life lost because we suspected that many temperature-related deaths were in the elderly, which would reduce the public health importance of temperature compared with other issues," Professor Barnett said.
"In fact we found the opposite, with a surprisingly high years of life lost figure."
Professor Barnett said things would only get worse as Climate Change continued.
"A 2°C increase in temperature in Brisbane between now and 2050 would result in an extra 381 years of life lost per year in Brisbane," he said.
"A 2°C increase in temperature is the figure the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is dangerous but could be reached unless more aggressive measures are undertaken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Professor Barnett said should temperatures increase beyond the 2°C mark the results would be catastrophic.
"A 4°C increase in temperature would result in an extra 3,242 years of life lost per year in Brisbane," he said.

In Cosmos Online on January 16, 2012:

Commenting on the study, Colin Butler of the Australian National University in Canberra said, "The 'years of life lost' approach is the real breakthrough in this paper," adding that he wishes he had thought of the idea himself. "They show that heat waves have a bigger effect on mortality in younger and middle-aged people than we would expect."

Abstract of the study The impact of temperature on years of life lost in Brisbane, Australia:

Temperature is an important determinant of health. A better knowledge of how temperature affects population health is important not only to the scientific community, but also to the decision-makers who develop and implement early warning systems and intervention strategies to mitigate the health effects of extreme temperatures1, 2. The temperature–health relationship is also of growing interest as climate change is projected to shift the overall temperature distribution higher3, 4. Previous studies have examined the relative risks of temperature-related mortality, but the absolute measure of years of life lost is also useful as it combines the number of deaths with life expectancy. Here we use years of life lost to provide a novel measure of the impact of temperature on mortality in Brisbane, Australia. We also project the future temperature-related years of life lost attributable to climate change. We show that the association between temperature and years of life lost is U-shaped, with increased years of life lost for cold and hot temperatures. The temperature-related years of life lost will worsen greatly if future climate change goes beyond a 2 °C increase and without any adaptation to higher temperatures. This study highlights that public health adaptation to climate change is necessary.

Twitter tweeters are not just pretty faces and amusing avatars

fill me up with.info reveals the political nature of Australian tweeters:

The research used two twitter profiles with embedded requests to complete the survey instrument.

One profile contacted active twitter users posting using relevant hashtags (#auspol, #qldpol, #nswpol, #actpol, #vicpol (excluding policing references), #taspol, #sapol (excluding Philippines references), #wapol, #ntpol), who used the words "Gillard" and "Abbott" in posts and users with "Australian politics" including in their bios (through the search engine tweepz.com). n=225

The second profile contacted a geographically disbursed group of Australians using the tweepz.com search tool to identify Australian Twitter users based on location. The survey research was undertaken between 14 December 2011 and 12 January 2012. n=110

Jaysus wept buckets - it's the other climate theory!

The basic argument which appears to be put forward here (by journalist Anne Jolis writing in The Wall Street Journal) is what has been called ‘The Other Climate Theory’ ie., solar winds affect cloud formation and clouds initiate temperature increases and therefore are a cause of global warming, which is ergo beyond human control.
“The theory has now moved from the corners of climate skepticism to the center of the physical-science universe: the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. At the Franco-Swiss home of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, scientists have been shooting simulated cosmic rays into a cloud chamber to isolate and measure their contribution to cloud formation. CERN's researchers reported last month that in the conditions they've observed so far, these rays appear to be enhancing the formation rates of pre-cloud seeds by up to a factor of 10. Current climate models do not consider any impact of cosmic rays on clouds.”
The article attracted over 1,000 comments and gave rise to this video, that in its turn further distorts CERN’s ongoing research which does not draw a link between clouds and climate change:




http://online.wsj.com/video/the-other-climate-theory/DDA61D17-339F-4F0F-95E3-325026562A7F.html

I have to wonder why reputable scientists bother to publish rebuttals such as this when the Murdoch meeja just writes what it wants to believe.

Over 100,000 Twitter users were psychologically assessed - without their knowledge or consent?

Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar ordissimilar characteristics. This propensity, referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed asthe correlation between attribute values of nearest neighbour vertices in a graph. Recent results indicate thatbeyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as “loneliness” canbe assortative in a social network. In spite of the increasing societal importance of online social networksit is unknown whether assortative mixing of psychological states takes place in situations where social tiesare mediated solely by online networking services in the absence of physical contact. Here, we show thatgeneral happiness or Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of Twitter users, as measured from a 6 month record oftheir individual tweets, is indeed assortative across the Twitter social network. To our knowledge this is thefirst result that shows assortative mixing in online networks at the level of SWB. Our results imply that onlinesocial networks may be equally subject to the social mechanisms that cause assortative mixing in real socialnetworks and that such assortative mixing takes place at the level of SWB. Given the increasing prevalenceof online social networks, their propensity to connect users with similar levels of SWB may be an importantinstrument in better understanding how both positive and negative sentiments spread through online social ties.Future research may focus on how event-specific mood states can propagate and influence user behavior in“real life”…….We collected a large set of Tweets submitted to Twitter in the period from November 28, 2008 to May 2009.The data set consisted of 129 million tweets submitted by several million Twitter users. Each Tweet contained aunique identifier, date-time of submission (GMT+0), submission type, and textual content, among other information…We complemented this cross-section sample of twitter activity by retrieving the complete history of over 4 millionusers, as well as the identity of all of their followers. The final Twitter Follower network contained 4,844,430users (including followers of our users for which we did not collect timeline information). Armed with the socialconnections and activity of these users we were able to measure the way in which the emotional content of eachusers varied in time and how it spread across links. [Happiness is assortative in online social networks,Johan Bollen, Bruno Gonçalves, Guangchen Ruan, & Huina Mao,March 2011]

The 4,844,430 users (whose tweets were scanned in 2008 for the aforementioned study) would work out at about eighty per cent of the estimated 6 million Twitter accounts in existence during that year. Although only those who posted at least one tweet daily over a six month period were retained in the study, which ended up formally assessing 102,009 users.

One of those harvested appears to be a co-founder of ISP/telco Sonic.net who happens to be ‘followed’ by Barack Obama.
The wife of a co-founder of SDMOMfia.com was caught up in the tweet trawl and she is also followed by the U.S. President.
Obama was found again following a PR person from the Detroit area whose name cropped up in connection with the study.
One male who has no public Twitter bio is yet another who is identified by this study. He links back to Obama through an account the President follows.
However, it is highly unlikely that Barack Obama’s official tweets were assessed for Subjective Well-Being aka general happiness as he didn’t tweet daily.
There are a number of other tweeters mentioned in the study who can be easily identified by the general public or by their own followers.

What on earth was Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing thinking in allowing any persons used in this study to be identified either directly within the text or in presentations undertaken later by one of the authors (and in one instance assigned an emotional state)? Did no-one realise the power of Twitter and Google to disclose identities to the idly curious?

These tweets may be in the public domain, but surely there are limits to the uses to which others may put them.