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11/11/2009 zz Global Darwin: Revolutionary roadOpinionNature 462, 162-163 (12 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462162a; Published online 11 November 2009 Global Darwin: Revolutionary roadJames Pusey1 Top of page AbstractIn China, under the threat of Western imperialism, interpretations of Darwin's ideas paved the way for Marx, Lenin and Mao, argues James Pusey in the third in our series on reactions to evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin's banner was first unfurled in China during the Reform Movement of 1895–98, in response to China's defeat in the Sino–Japanese War. This had been the most crushing moment in what the Chinese call their century of humiliation, during which the Manchu Qing Dynasty barely survived five great rebellions, and lost four wars against foreign imperialists: Britain, Britain and France, France, and — most galling of all — Japan. This last defeat was the most frightening, not because the Chinese feared 'puny Japan', as they often called it, but because they feared that the European powers, emboldened by this demonstration of weakness, would "carve up the Chinese melon" into colonies. The watchword of the reform movement was 'bianfa', meaning 'change our institutions'. But the very word 'change' was anathema to the conservative officialdom of China. So reformers turned to Darwin as a foreign authority on change, presenting him not first and foremost as a natural scientist who had discovered an amazing fact of life, but as a political scientist who had discovered a cosmic imperative for change. Meanwhile, the Europeans waved Darwin's banner to justify imperialism. Dubbing themselves 'the fit', they declared their right to rule the 'unfit'. And some Chinese accepted this argument. Liang Qichao, one of the leading reformers, said in 1898: "If a country can strengthen itself and make itself one of the fittest, then, even if it annihilates the unfit and the weak, it can still not be said to be immoral. Why? Because it is a law of evolution." The reformers had to find hope in On the Origin of Species. And they did, but their most optimistic interpretations were based on a handful of mistranslations, themselves based on a series of misunderstandings. (Westerners leapt to these misunderstandings as well — without the benefit of mistranslations.) Chinese readings of Darwin inspired two groups — reformers and revolutionaries — to attempt to change their society through different means. Ultimately, after the failure of both groups and an erosion of traditional philosophies, Chinese Darwinian thinking prepared the nation for the rhetoric of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Mao Zedong.
The man who introduced Darwinian evolution to the reformers of 1895 was Yan Fu. Yan had graduated from the naval academy at Fuzhou, and was sent to England in 1877 for further study of the naval arts, which patriots hoped would one day help drive European imperialists out of the China Sea. But in England, Yan discovered political philosophy, which he came to think of as the true secret of Britain's 'fitness'. He returned to China in 1879 with a bundle of books, by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Darwin and others, that he thought could rescue China from extinction. He meant to translate them, but did not publish anything for about 15 years, when goaded into action by the insult and injury of the war with Japan. In 1895 Yan published his first essay, Whence Strength?, soon followed by a brilliant, periphrastic translation of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, which Yan wrote in such elegant classical Chinese that even conservatives respected the text. The Origin itself was too long and too difficult for Yan to tackle. But Yan's translations were enough to introduce to China the basic ideas of evolution and, more importantly, the handful of Darwinian slogans that were taken up by social Darwinists around the world.  G. LAM Subtle errors of translation, however, went with them: "natural selection" came out as "natural elimination"; the "survival of the fittest" became the "superior survive and the inferior are defeated"; and, causing the most confusion of all, "evolution" became jinhua lun, "the theory of progressive change". Strictly speaking, Darwin did not prove that evolution led to progress; to this day, that mistranslation makes it hard to discuss evolution in Chinese. As Confucius said: "If terms are not correct, discourse is difficult." Just before Darwin's ideas reached China, the scholar and bureaucrat Kang Youwei argued that Confucius had delineated three stages of world progress: chaos, ascending peace and great peace. A mixture of these ideas soon spawned a plethora of 'stage theories' of history, all of which claimed to outline the natural and inevitable development of all 'fit races'. This seemingly benign idea — that cosmic forces or natural laws were perfecting mankind and human society — eventually led to racist or class philosophies that killed people. Natural lawAt the start of the reform movement, the promise of Darwinian progress (which was not really Darwinian) seemed to hold the key to China's salvation. China was in the monarchy stage and should hence move on to the constitutional monarchy stage. The fittest nation on Earth, Great Britain, had shown the way. Yan wanted democracy for China — even anarchic democracy, without presidential rule. In Whence Strength? his call for reform was revolutionary: "Establish a parliament at the capital and let each province and county elect its own officials." But 'Darwin' held him back from real revolution. Yan believed that step-by-step progress was a fixed natural law, so stages had to be taken in order. America had skipped constitutional monarchy and gone straight to democracy, but a resulting class war, he felt, would be their undoing. "Should we, then, now throw away all loyalty to our ruler?" he asked in his essay. "We most certainly should not! Because the time has not arrived. ... Our people are not yet ready to rule themselves." (An argument that Chinese governments have used ever since to postpone democracy.) Sun Yat-sen, later dubiously dubbed the father or George Washington of his country, was also a professed Darwinian, and an advocate of democracy. But Sun was as convinced that Darwinism was for revolution as Yan, Kang and Liang were convinced that it was for reform. One of Sun's followers, Zou Rong, put it most succinctly: "Revolution is a law of Evolution." Taking advantage of the war against Japan, Sun and his would-be revolutionaries put their philosophy into action in 1895, hiring an 'army' from a secret society in Hong Kong in an attempt to capture the city of Guangzhou and trigger a revolution. It was an almost farcical failure. They arrived in Guangzhou by ferry, but their weapons were on the wrong boat, leaving them unarmed for their grand revolution. The police easily quashed them, although Sun managed to escape, eventually to Japan. A few years later, the reformers had only a little more luck. They won the ear of the young Guangxu Emperor and established a constitutional monarchy — on paper — in the summer of 1898. But the Emperor's aunt, the Empress Dowager, crushed the reform movement, beheaded the six leaders she could catch and put the Emperor under lifelong house arrest. Yan was somehow left alone. Others, led by Kang and Liang, took refuge in Japan. The two self-professed Darwinian camps had much in common. Both believed in stage theories of history. Both were for democracy — but not yet. Confucian philosophy led them to believe that the fit were those who made themselves fit, and Daoist thinking made it easy to believe in a natural path that the fit could follow to survive. Both believed, at once, in determinism and 'determinationism' — a potent if illogical mix that at once met impatient patriots' demand for action and promised victory. Sadly, both camps also accepted the pervasive Western view that Darwin had proven races unequal — that one race was 'fitter' and therefore better than another. The reformers had originally done so to disassociate themselves from those who had fallen prey to the imperialists, such as the Africans and Indians. But in their exile in Japan, reformers and revolutionaries alike turned angrily on the Manchus as scapegoats, labelling them evolutionary low life, whose 'unnatural' conquest of the Han Chinese was responsible for China's peril. There were also crucial differences between the camps. The reformers, despite everything, remained loyal to the Guangxu Emperor. They were convinced that the stage of constitutional monarchy could not be skipped, and they were against civil war. The revolutionaries believed that the Qing dynasty needed to be overthrown, that China could 'lie deng' (leap over stages) to catch up to the West and that civil war was an indispensable precondition of China's evolution or progress. For a decade the two groups debated the reform or revolution question in Chinese journals smuggled back to China from Japan — with both sides wildly waving Darwin's banner. Enter the MarxistsIn the end, the debate between reformers and revolutionaries was settled by a nearly accidental success. On a truly dark and stormy night in October 1911, Sun's followers pulled off an uprising in Wuchang. The dynasty soon fell, with Yuan Shikai, the leading 'loyalist' general, bought off with a gift of the presidency. But Yuan killed the Republic by trying to crown himself Emperor. Yuan's generals baulked. Yuan died. China fell to pieces, ruled by warlords. The debate over reform and revolution revived. Eventually the New Culture Movement arose, with Darwinian reruns, as reformers gave up on politics, embracing instead cultural reform — until 1919, when the Western powers betrayed China when they signed the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, granting Germany's 'possessions' in China to Japan. In all of this, "politics", as Mao would later say, were "in command". Few Chinese seemed shocked by the fact of evolution, or indeed overly interested in it. Unlike Europeans, few perceived, at first, any threat to their traditional philosophies or religions. But in the decade that followed the failure of the Reform Movement, Chinese philosophies — Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism — did come under attack, as pacifistic doctrines that were unfit because they had rendered China unfit to survive. And so, both philosophically and politically, reformers and revolutionaries together created a naturally abhorrent vacuum. Many tried to fill it: Sun, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek) and, finally, the small group of intellectuals who, in indignation at the betrayal at Versailles, found in Marxism what seemed to them the fittest faith on Earth to help China to survive. This was not, of course, all Darwin's doing, but Darwin was involved in it all. To believe in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect, to inevitable progress, through set stages (which could, however, be skipped). One had to believe that history was a violent, hereditary class struggle (almost a 'racial' struggle); that the individual must be severely subordinated to the group; that an enlightened group must lead the people for their own good; that the people must not be humane to their enemies; that the forces of history assured victory to those who were right and who struggled. Who taught Chinese these things? Marx? Mao? No. Darwin. FURTHER READING Schwartz, B. I. In Search of Wealth and Power — Yen Fu and the West (Harvard Univ. Press, 1964). For more on Darwin see http://www.nature.com/darwin
10/28/2009 zz Stitching science togetherOpinionNature 461, 881 (15 October 2009) | doi:10.1038/461881a; Published online 14 October 2009 Stitching science togetherCameron Neylon1 Top of page
AbstractGoogle Wave is the kind of open-source online collaboration tool that should drive scientists to wire their research and publications into an interactive data web, says Cameron Neylon. 
ILLUSTRATION BY M. HODSON Science communication today remains firmly wedded to its print origins. We cling to the notion that 'the real version' exists on the page. Beyond ease of delivery, we take very little advantage of the potential of the World Wide Web to transform the way we store and transfer knowledge. We rarely take the opportunity to update material with new data, or to provide a record of how a document or data set has changed. Gene names and protein structures should be routinely linked to database entries through hyperlinks. The outputs of computational processes should be connected to their inputs, so analyses can be redone. If we can make these records accessible to humans and readable by machines, then whole new types of analysis will become possible, indeed standard. Many of these things are possible today. But they are hard to achieve. Much effort has gone into solving parts of the problem, by big players such as Microsoft and Amazon as well as by smaller organizations. Electronic lab notebooks can help to capture the details of science, and databases can make it available to the user. Reference-management tools such as Delicious, semantic data stores and Wikipedia can help to wire up and monitor knowledge. But the tools are often difficult to use and don't 'talk' to each other. There is no single framework that makes it easy to link all the steps of science. Scientists do their analysis and writing using different software, and prepare graphs and record data using different tools. Very few companies worldwide have both the expertise and resources to take on the task of stitching this together. So it is with great interest that I have watched Google develop its product, Google Wave. The company describes Google Wave as "what e-mail would look like if it were invented today". It blends elements of e-mail with instant messaging and online collaborative authoring. The big change is that the 'document' or 'wave' is shared between all the participants and updates flow in real time. You no longer need to worry about which version of a document you have e-mailed around. This is helpful for scientists, but not revolutionary. Where Wave offers a big step for science is in two other functionalities. Two steps forwardFirst, Wave introduces the idea of robots: automated agents that can be invited into a document. Robots could look through your paper checking for Protein Data Bank codes or gene names, for example, and putting in links to the databases. A robot might represent a lab instrument, adding data automatically to your laboratory record when they become available. You can easily add maps, video or three-dimensional graphics to your work using 'gadgets' or 'applications', familiar from services such as iGoogle and Facebook. Robots can interact with this information, making it possible to have a dashboard in your inbox to monitor and control instruments in the lab. The second step forward is using versions. Each wave maintains a record of every change. It could be possible to check each step from data collection to drawing a graph and its publication. This would allow a reader to step through an analysis to see where conclusions have come from, and would make detecting fraud — or honest mistakes — much easier. Google has done a good thing in making the protocol and programming tools open source, enabling people to test and build. Perhaps 50 people, myself included, from experimental scientists to journal publishers, have been testing the prototype system for science applications since June, building robots that link chemical information, visualize data and format references. Since 30 September, a much bigger group has been testing. But real benefits will come only if the system is widely adopted. Perhaps a new generation of scientists will be required to exploit the power that working with these dynamic documents and tools offers. Solving the current problems in science communication requires the intervention of strong companies such as Google. But it will take more than technical advances to provoke scientists into taking full advantage of the web. We need pressure, and perhaps compulsion, from journals and funders to raise publishing standards to the new level made possible by such tools. Google Wave may not be, indeed is probably not, the whole answer. But it points the way to tools that build records and reproducibility into every step. And that has to be good for science.
10/16/2009 zz China's unofficial democracyBooks and ArtsNature 461, 731 (8 October 2009) | doi:10.1038/461731a; Published online 7 October 2009 China's unofficial democracyLi Gong1 BOOK REVIEWED-The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Onlineby Guobin Yang Columbia University Press: 2009. 320 pp. $29.50, £20.50  JIANAN YU/REUTERS/CORBIS China's online community has found its own voice. In July this year, a 20-year-old university student in the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou was sentenced to three years in prison for driving recklessly and killing a pedestrian. This would have been a sad but unremarkable case, except that it was only brought following a huge national outcry. Reports that local police initially protected the student, whose family was well connected, were spread over the Internet and eventually forced the police to respond. Similar examples of online citizen activism occur every day. The Power of the Internet in China analyses how the Internet's rapid development in China has given its citizens a mechanism to air and share individual opinions that may differ from official positions, to connect and organize often against the will of the authorities, and to improve their own lives directly and visibly. The Internet allows Chinese citizens to practise, as cultural critic Raymond Williams termed it, "unofficial democracy". In researching the book, Guobin Yang, a professor at Columbia University who grew up in China, read Chinese material first-hand, observed and participated in online forums and interacted with Chinese citizens online. The book's 70 case studies range from patients with diabetes or hepatitis B fighting against governmental employment discrimination, to Internet-organized worldwide demonstrations in response to the 1998 Indonesian atrocities towards the local ethnic Chinese population, to massive online and offline protests over news reporting by Western media in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Yang's recounting of notable events along the historical path to China's online activism brought back old memories of my own. The first electronic gathering place targeted at people interested in China — the USENET newsgroup soc.culture.china — was started soon after I left Beijing for Cambridge, UK, in late 1987. I quickly became an active participant, devoting entire mornings to reading and replying to postings. As a student, I helped edit China News Digest, the first China-themed English-language electronic newsletter, which was published free by e-mail. The milestone event for the citizens' Internet inside China was the founding in 1995 of the Tsinghua Bulletin Board System (BBS), which was started by students at the computer-science department of Tsinghua University, where I was an undergraduate. Even today, with the prevalence of text messaging, blogs, YouTube and Twitter, the BBS continues to be a widely used online platform in China, and its underlying technology has progressed from dial-up connections to broadband networks. Although filled with vivid anecdotes, this book is an academic publication. Its storytelling is punctuated by jargon and scholarly narratives, including numerous academic references. Nonetheless, it is a valuable information resource. Yang's analysis covers a broad canvas and includes many statistics. The investigation into the business side of online activism will particularly fascinate many readers. Online viewings surely translate into money, and manufactured online contention generates lots of viewings. Some businesses, including art dealers, present items as 'banned in China' to promote their wares. Also a reality are competitive tactics, such as the '50 cents party' — people who are paid 50 cents an item for posting prescribed messages at online forums. Governmental control of content is the elephant in the room. The mechanisms for restricting content flow into China and for controlling domestic Internet content — down to a single book entry on Amazon, for example — have become sophisticated in recent years. This is aided by the fact that only a few state-owned access points connect the domestic Internet to the outside world. Chinese 'netizens' counter these constraints with ingenuity, such as using Internet proxies to bypass state firewalls, or posting opinions in unrelated forums to postpone detection. The Chinese habit of reposting — in which a user copies an article in its entirety to a new forum, rather than linking to the original posting — makes the job of eradicating an erratic blog much harder. Sixteen years ago this month, media magnate Rupert Murdoch declared that "advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere". Last year, China overtook the United States as the country with the largest online population. In the time between, Yang's book documents how China's netizens have stumbled on online activism as a response to, among other things, a flawed justice system. Time will tell whether the revolution in communication technologies will lead to a new cultural or social revolution.
09/15/2009 zz China Fights Against Statistical Corruption
LettersChina Fights Against Statistical CorruptionParticularly in the current financial crisis, many countries rely on statistics released by the Chinese government for production and trade of bulk commodities, exchange rates, and economic stimulus. However, the credibility of China's statistics has long been questioned. On 1 May, a new regulation, Rules on Punishment for Violation of Laws in Statistics, was put in effect by the Ministry of Supervision, Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, and the National Bureau of Statistics (1).Statistical corruption has been found in China for years, largely for two reasons. First, economic growth is a key factor determining the promotion of government officials. Statistical data and numbers are regarded as a reflection of economic growth, which is used to evaluate the performance of the officials. This is the so-called "numbers make leaders" phenomenon ("shu zi chu guan" in Chinese). Second, the statistical organizations are not independent entities in China. They are a part of the government and hence are vulnerable to government interference. Without specific laws and regulations to punish statistical corruption, government leaders can intervene in statistical reporting with low political risks. They may tailor statistics for different purposes, such as inflating statistical numbers that indicate economic achievements and decreasing statistical numbers for environmental pollution and damage (2). This is the so-called "leaders make numbers" phenomenon ("guan chu shu zi" in Chinese). The previous Statistics Law in China has been in effect since 1983, but it was too vague to enforce. Although it stated the penalty for illegal acts, the law did not clearly specify the types of the illegal acts and the extent to which penalties should be imposed. In contrast, the new regulation lists four types of statistics cheating: revising statistics without permission, or making up statistics; forcing or ordering statistics departments or individuals to revise or make up statistics or refuse to report statistics; retaliation against individuals who refuse to issue false statistics; and retaliation against individuals who report statistics violations (3). The degree of punishment depends on consequences of the violations, and the punishments include a warning, recording a demerit, or even removing officials from their positions. The new regulation is an important step in the fight against statistical corruption in China. Nevertheless, to eradicate illegal acts in statistical work, further actions are needed, such as reform of the evaluation system for officials and the establishment of independent statistical organizations. Without progress in these areas, the goal of an 8% GDP growth rate for 2009 announced by the Chinese government could be merely another number created by leaders. Junguo Liu1,* and Hong Yang2 * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: water21water@yahoo.com
1 School of Nature Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, 100083, China.
References
09/03/2009 zz Internet addiction center opens in USInternet addiction center opens in US AP – This photo taken Sept. 1, 2009 shows reSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Program client Ben Alexander … By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS, Associated Press Writer Nicholas K. Geranios, Associated Press Writer – 22 mins ago
FALL CITY, Wash. – Ben Alexander spent nearly every waking minute playing the video game "World of Warcraft." As a result, he flunked out of the University of Iowa. Alexander, 19, needed help to break an addiction he calls as destructive as alcohol or drugs. He found it in this suburb of high-tech Seattle, where what claims to be the first residential treatment center for Internet addiction in the United States just opened its doors. The center, called ReSTART, is somewhat ironically located near Redmond, headquarters of Microsoft and a world center of the computer industry. It opened in July and for $14,000 offers a 45-day program intended to help people wean themselves from pathological computer use, which can include obsessive use of video games, texting, Facebook, eBay, Twitter and any other time-killers brought courtesy of technology. "We've been doing this for years on an outpatient basis," said Hilarie Cash, a therapist and executive director of the center. "Up until now, we had no place to send them." Internet addiction is not recognized as a separate disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, and treatment is not generally covered by insurance. But there are many such treatment centers in China, South Korea and Taiwan — where Internet addiction is taken very seriously — and many psychiatric experts say it is clear that Internet addiction is real and harmful. The five-acre center in Fall City, about 30 miles east of Seattle, can handle up to six patients at a time. Alexander is so far the only patient of the program, which uses a cold turkey approach. He spends his days in counseling and psychotherapy sessions, doing household chores, working on the grounds, going on outings, exercising and baking a mean batch of ginger cookies. Whether such programs work in the long run remains to be seen. For one thing, the Internet is so pervasive that it can be nearly impossible to resist, akin to placing an alcoholic in a bar, Cash said. The effects of addiction are no joke. They range from loss of a job or marriage to car accidents for those who can't stop texting while driving. Some people have died after playing video games for days without a break, generally stemming from a blood clot associated with being sedentary. Psychotherapist Cosette Dawna Rae has owned the bucolic retreat center since 1994, and was searching for a new use for it when she hooked up with Cash. They decided to avoid treating people addicted to Internet sex, in part because she lives in the center with her family. According to Dr. Kimberly Young of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa., addiction warning signs are being preoccupied with thoughts of the Internet; using it longer than intended, and for increasing amounts of time; repeatedly making unsuccessful efforts to control use; jeopardizing relationships, school or work to spend time online; lying to cover the extent of Internet use; using the Internet to escape problems or feelings of depression; physical changes to weight, headaches or carpal tunnel syndrome. Exactly how to respond is being debated. For instance, Internet addiction can be a symptom of other mental illness, such as depression, or conditions like autism, experts say. "From what we know, many so-called `Internet addicts' are folks who have severe depression, anxiety disorders, or social phobic symptoms that make it hard for them to live a full, balanced life and deal face-to-face with other people," said Dr. Ronald Pies, professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N.Y. "It may be that unless we treat their underlying problems, some new form of `addiction' will pop up down the line," Pies said. There is debate about whether to include Internet addiction as a separate illness in the next edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," due in 2012, which determines which mental illnesses get covered by insurance. Pies and Dr. Jerald Block, of Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, said there is not enough research yet to justify that. "Among psychiatrists there is general recognition that many patients have difficulty controlling their impulses to chat online, or play computer games or watch porn," Block said. "The debate is how to classify that." Cash, co-author of the book "Video Games & Your Kids," first started dealing with Internet addiction in 1994, with a patient who was so consumed by video games that he had lost his marriage and two jobs. Internet addicts miss out on real conversations and real human development, often see their hygiene, their home and relationships deteriorate, don't eat or sleep properly and don't get enough exercise, Rae said. Alexander is a tall, quiet young man who always got good grades and hopes to become a biologist. He started playing "World of Warcraft," a hugely popular online multiplayer role playing game, about a year ago, and got sucked right in. "At first it was a couple of hours a day," he said. "By midway through the first semester, I was playing 16 or 17 hours a day. "School wasn't interesting," he said. "It was an easy way to socialize and meet people." It was also an easy way to flunk out. Alexander dropped out in the second semester and went to a traditional substance abuse program, which was not a good fit. He graduated from a 10-week outdoors-based program in southern Utah, but felt he still had little control over his gaming. So he sought out a specialized program and arrived in Fall City in July. He thinks it was a good choice. "I don't think I'll go back to `World of Warcraft' anytime soon," Alexander said. 09/01/2009 zz Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing -- for BiaoGe again
ReviewStrategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific PublishingAllen H. Renear* and Carole L. Palmer
The revolution in scientific publishing that has been promised since the 1980s is about to take place. Scientists have always read strategically, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, scan, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content. An observed recent increase in strategic reading in the online environment will soon be further intensified by two current trends: (i) the widespread use of digital indexing, retrieval, and navigation resources and (ii) the emergence within many scientific disciplines of interoperable ontologies. Accelerated and enhanced by reading tools that take advantage of ontologies, reading practices will become even more rapid and indirect, transforming the ways in which scientists engage the literature and shaping the evolution of scientific publishing.
Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, Graduate
School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: renear@illinois.edu The 1980s abounded in descriptions of a coming new world of scholarly communication, predicting functionality that we knew was possible and would soon be technologically feasible. This imagined world, which was never fully realized, predicted advanced navigation; discipline-specific intelligent tools for searching, browsing, and analysis; reader-initiated hypertext linking; "live" data-driven diagrams; computationally available information objects; searchable indexed annotations; thorough-going interoperability; and so on. Substantial improvements in hardware and software and an infrastructure of networked communications now make this anticipated functionality possible. Lying at the heart of the changes taking place is an escalation of strategic reading practices. Scientists have always read strategically, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, compare, arrange, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content. Now, however, two important trends are interacting to support and intensify the effectiveness of these practices. The first is the wide-scale use by scientists of digital indexing, retrieval, and navigation resources (such as PubMed, Web of Science, the ACM Digital Library, NASA’s Astrophysics Data System, CiteSeer, Scopus, and Google Scholar) to exploit large quantities of relevant information without reading individual articles. The second is the emergence within many scientific disciplines of ontologies for representing and linking scientific data. This convergence of digital resources and data-linking ontologies will result in even more rapid and indirect use of the literature, supported not only by text mining (1) and literature-based discovery applications (2), but by "ontology-aware" strategic reading tools as well.
Why Will the Revolution Happen Now?
When it was launched in 1992, the Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, jointly designed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, was seen by some as the beginning of the long-awaited world of advanced digital publishing. However, the journal failed to flourish, and the new world did not materialize. In retrospect, we can see that in the early 1990s, none of the basic conditions required for an advanced scientific publishing system existed. Not only was the basic technology and infrastructure inadequate, but the entire publishing system also would have required extensive coordinated changes. Although there was no revolution, an important transformation did take place in the 1990s. In 1993, very few scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals had an electronic version, and yet by 2003, virtually all of them did. For the daily work routines of most scientists, that new format had already become more important than print. The system of digital publishing that emerged from 1993 to 2003 was impressive in some respects, but was still largely another case of new technology compromised by imitation of the old. The reasons a more radical change failed to occur are understandable in retrospect, and they also suggest why we are now on the cusp of a larger change. None of the developments during this period required costly or uncertain changes in workflow and production processes, software tools, user behavior, or business models. STM publishers were already creating Adobe PostScript files for print production. These could be automatically converted to the Adobe page description language format (PDF), which was suitable for distribution over the existing Internet and could be browsed with existing free software applications. Users, in turn, were presented with a printlike experience that was at once familiar and yet had additional advantages, including Internet delivery, digital storage, full-text searching, and local printing, all of which was easily realized with existing technologies. Hence, as its value became apparent, PDF-based digital STM publishing emerged relatively quickly, with few changes in production or existing infrastructure. Since 1992, processor speeds, memory, storage, and bandwidth to the desktop have undergone enormous improvements, as have connectivity and costs. Standard protocols for network communication have been adopted, new software tools and software engineering strategies have emerged, and there is now a supporting infrastructure of information professions and institutions. The pervasive use of the World Wide Web via intuitive Web browsers is an especially visible change, and the widespread use of Extensible Markup Language (XML), with its associated standards and technologies, provides a foundational framework for storing, processing, and presenting information on the Web. In addition, an important recent development is the convergence within the STM publishing community on a single XML schema for the representation of scientific articles: the National Library of Medicine (NLM)’s Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite (3). The driving force for change remains the same: the growing quantity and complexity of information in combination with limited time for reading. But in some disciplines, we seem to be past the point where any further specialization of research focus or elaboration of collaborative relationships are effective (4, 5) (Fig. 1). Just as the increased quantity of information and general intensity of scientific activity is reaching the point where it cannot be sustained with current practices, technology and user behavior are making new practices feasible, and research scenarios that a decade ago were utopian are now widely anticipated by practicing scientists. P. Bourne, a Public Library of Science journal editor, offers this vision of the near future the scientific literature will seamlessly provide annotation of records in the biological databases. Imagine reading a description of an active site of a biological molecule in a paper, being able to access immediately the atomic coordinates specifically for that active site, and then using a tool to explore the intricate set of hydrogen-bonding interactions described in the paper.... Alternatively, if you are starting with the data ... viewing the chromosome location of a human single-nucleotide polymorphism associated with a neurological disorder, ... immediately access a variety of papers ranked in order of relevance to your profile ... pinpointing the reference to the single-nucleotide polymorphism in the full-text article (6), p. 179.
This sort of information gathering goes well beyond conventional digital publishing and reveals why the current state of affairs has failed to meet some expectations. As chemists P. Murray-Rust and H. S. Rzepa remarked in 2004, "The current transition to [PDF-based] e-journals seems to be welcomed by many—but not us ... a cultural change in our approach to information is needed" (7).
How Are Scientists Working with the Literature?
Scientists have always strived to avoid unnecessary reading. Like all researchers, they use indexing and citations as indicators of relevance, abstracts and literature reviews as surrogates for full papers, and social networks of colleagues and graduate students as personal alerting services. The aim is to move rapidly through the literature to assess and exploit content with as little actual reading as possible. As indexing, recommending, and navigation has become more sophisticated in the online environment, these strategic reading practices have intensified. Now, as scientists search and browse, they are making queries and selecting information in much tighter iterations and with many different kinds of objectives in mind, almost as if they were playing a fast-paced video game. They sweep through resources, changing search strings, chaining references backward and citations forward, dodging integrator and publisher sites to find open-access copies, continually working to reduce the number of clicks required for access. By note-taking or cutting and pasting, scientists often extract and accumulate bits of specific information, such as findings, equations, protocols, and data. In this process, rapid judgments are made—such as assessments of relevance, impact, and quality—while search queries are being formulated and refined. (Fig. 3). The goal often seems to be undifferentiated assimilation of information about a domain or a problem at hand, and the online experience may be highly valuable, even though no clear aim is met and no articles to read are located. In a compelling analogy, Nicholas et al. (8) describe a "slightly irritated" father watching his young daughter flick from channel to channel while watching television [the] father asks ... why she cannot make up her mind and she answers that she is not attempting to make up her mind but is watching all the channels. ... gathering information horizontally, not vertically (8), p. 40. And they conclude Now we see what the migration from traditional to electronic sources has meant in information seeking terms. We are all bouncers and flickers, and the success of Google is a testament to that, with its marvelous ability to enhance and amplify this flicking and bouncing (like a really good remote).... In the past, information seeking was seen to be the first step to creating knowledge. Now ... it is a continuous process (8), pp. 41–42.
Just as the aim of channel surfing is not to find a program to watch, the goal of literature surfing, is not to find an article to read, but rather to find, assess, and exploit a range of information by scanning portions of many articles. This behavior is common among scientists (9). Longitudinal studies of e-journal use confirm that scientists are indeed "reading" more papers at a faster pace (10). That is, the total time spent reading journal articles has risen only a little, whereas the number of journal articles read per year has gone up much faster and appears to be growing still. The number of articles read (as distinguished from those merely browsed) by scientists was ~50% higher in 2005 than in the mid-1990s. Furthermore, though the average reading time per article did not change much from 1977 to the mid-1990s (48 versus 47 min), it started falling in the mid-1990s and is now just over 30 min per article (Fig. 2). At the same time, identifying papers by searching online increased more than fourfold between 1977 and 2005. These changes in journal use are far greater in STM disciplines than the averages over all disciplines, suggesting that as work with the literature has moved online, scientists are scanning more and reading less. Early digital library research also showed how scientists scan individual printed journal articles to identify key components—such as tables of contents, references, figures, formatted lists, equations, and scientific names—for quick review and absorption of information (11, 12). More recent studies of the research process have emphasized the varied ways in which scientists work with information (13, 14). The literature is scanned not only to position new findings in cognate fields and learn about collaborators’ domains, but also to monitor the progress of peers and competitors. Information is collated to compare measurement and instrumentation details; it is also used to compile personal collections in evolving areas of interest and to extract the facts and evidence needed to build databases. These are all aspects of strategic reading, a robust, well-entrenched behavior that is vastly more efficient in the digital realm and is thus a promising target for digital support.
How Is Scientific Information Being Represented?
Structured terminologies for representing scientific data, along with standard XML-based techniques for defining and using these terminologies, are forming the basis for new types of scientific publishing. Although computer-processible scientific terminologies range from simple standardized vocabularies to sophisticated formal systems with logical axioms, we have called all of them ontologies. Ontologies are particularly prominent in the biological sciences (15, 16). One example of rapid adoption is the Gene Ontology (GO) (17), which started in 1998 to support the annotation of genes and gene products and is now very widely used, containing more than 25,000 terms and 3.3 million annotations. Although many biological ontologies were originally developed independently, the need for interoperability has driven collaboration, a good example being the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO), which currently has 54 participating projects (18), including Microarray Gene Expression Data (MGED), BioPAX, for biological pathways data, and Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA). Although the size, complexity, and logical design of scientific ontologies may vary, a partial description of GO, drawing on examples from the GO introductory material, will illustrate some of their general features (19, 20). GO consists of three separate ontologies: (i) molecular function, (ii) biological process, and (iii) cellular component. Within each of these, terms are uniquely identified, defined, and related in a network of "is a" relationships (e.g., a nuclear chromosome is a chromosome). GO also contains the relationship "part of" (e.g., periplasmic flagellum is part of periplasmic space), and recently, the relationship "regulates" and subtype relationships "positively regulates" and "negatively regulates" were added. These relationships have logical features; for instance, "is a" and "part of" are transitive (e.g., if X is part of Y and Y is part of Z, then X is part of Z). It is easy to see not only how the controlled vocabulary of a shared ontology can facilitate the integration of data from multiple sources, but also how relationships such as "is a", "part of", and "regulates" can support other information management tasks as well, including information retrieval and text mining, error checking, and automated inferencing. Neither controlled vocabularies nor even logic-based ontologies are entirely new, although the enormous increase in the amount and complexity of biological data makes such organizational strategies increasingly urgent. Now, however, we can make ontologies and their applications computationally available and interoperable through well-supported standards associated with the Internet and World Wide Web. In 1998, as work began on GO, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released XML (21), a metalanguage for defining markup languages (22) for representing information on the World Wide Web. Originally designed for document-oriented languages, XML was soon used for other kinds of information as well. XML languages are defined by a computer-readable schema, which specifies, among other things, the terms of the markup language and the ways those terms can be arranged in valid documents. XML organizes information as a hierarchical structure (an "ordered tree") of labeled nodes and attribute/value pairs and represents that structure in a linear format readable by both humans and computers. Software can read data in this format and construct the correct tree structure, even without the schema that defines the language (this is a virtue of XML). If a schema is available, additional processing is possible, such as verifying that the data are complete and correctly organized; a schema can also configure editing tools so that human coders are only offered legal coding options, making coding easier and syntax errors impossible. In just 10 years, XML and related supporting software and standards have come to dominate information representation in networked environments—all popular Web browsers support XML, and most major database systems import and export XML-formatted data. Although using XML to declare and apply a terminological vocabulary improves interoperability and access to software applications, it does have some limitations. XML schemas specify syntax, not semantics (23). An XML schema does not itself indicate how to interpret portions of a particular XML tree structure in terms of scientific assertions, nor is it, alone, suitable for defining logical relationships among terms. That information must be recorded in the natural language documentation for the schema, but then it is unavailable for computer processing. To address this problem, the semantic Web languages Resource Description Framework (RDF), Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) were developed (24). These are computer-processible knowledge representation languages that provide a standard technique for defining ontologies and expressing assertions that use terms from those ontologies. Although technically independent of any particular computer-encoding format, RDFS and OWL each have a standard XML syntax that is now well-supported by software applications and widely used for ontology representation. Today, an emerging infrastructure of education, research, conferences, organizations, and software tools is sustaining the development and adoption of scientific ontologies and providing opportunities for coordination to improve interoperability and share best practices. Particularly important for biology are the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, OBO, and the International Society for Biocuration, as well as more broadly defined organizations such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information and the European Bioinformatics Institute. One notable software application for ontology development is the widely used and well-supported Protégé ontology editor.
How Can Ontologies Help Scientific Publishing?
Originally motivated by the need for data integration, scientific ontologies are now being explored for STM publishing to support information retrieval and text mining, with applications for hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery well underway. Nevertheless, reading-like engagement with scientific articles is not likely to disappear entirely: The natural language prose of scientific articles provides too much valuable nuance and context to be treated only as data (25). Scientists may have moved well beyond traditional reading, but they still remain engaged with the narrative of scientific articles and need tools to help them read, and not only mine, that narrative. The integration of ontologies into the scientific literature has been recommended by leading scientists (26–28), and the current generation of ontology-based text mining and retrieval tools in the biomedical sciences is already taking advantage of natural language processing and databases of annotations (5, 29, 30). One example is Textpresso, an ontology-based mining and retrieval system that works with prepared collections of articles, split into sentences and annotated with terms from 33 ontology categories, three of which correspond to the GO ontologies (31). Results screens present a ranked list of sentences within a ranked list of articles, with term highlighting, and links to articles and external databases (Fig. 4, top). Reading the sentences of an article in relevance order rather than narrative order is an example of strategic reading within an article. An example of strategic reading across a collection is provided by Information Hyperlinked over Proteins (iHOP), which uses genes and proteins to create a network of sentences and abstracts for searching and navigating MEDLINE abstracts (32). The iHOP database processes abstract sentences using National Center for Biotechnology Information taxonomy identifiers and the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus and supplies pages of configurable results, in ranked lists of sentences retrieved from many abstracts (Fig. 4, bottom).
Unlike similar explorations in the 1980s and 1990s, these are not computer science experiments or pilot projects requiring substantial investment and large upfront changes in infrastructure and practices to scale them up for general use. These are projects that are already producing practical and widely used tools.
How Do We Support and Shape These Changes?
The infrastructures and services to support strategic reading practices will no doubt be promoted by open access and alternative publishing models, which are already being widely discussed in the academic community. However, research on information behavior and the use of ontologies is also needed. Traditional approaches to evaluating information systems, such as precision, recall, and satisfaction measures, offer limited guidance for further development of strategic reading technologies. Finer-grained methods that analyze what scientists actually do and value are required if we want to understand the nearly subconscious tactics that govern second-by-second interactions with the literature and the nuances of intention and use. We know, for instance, that scientists often have trouble locating very problem-specific information (on methods and protocols, for instance) and that the occasional exploration of results from another discipline can have considerable impact on progress or the direction of research. These are the kinds of information behaviors that we need to understand more fully to design tools that go beyond search and retrieval to support creative strategic reading. For ontology-aware reading tools to function well, terminological annotations must be included in, or mapped to, the XML encoding of articles during the publishing production process, to connect names and phrases in narrative text with appropriate standard terminology. The emergence of the NLM schema as a standard XML encoding for scientific articles provides a promising shared context for terminological annotation; however, we also need specific strategies that are economically sustainable within the current context of STM publishing workflows, as well as remedies for "legacy data," the articles already published and stored in repositories. To exploit terminological annotations across the Internet, reading tools will have to operate in real time to take advantage of the ontologies that define and relate terms and connect terms with relevant databases with the use of "service-oriented architectures" (33). Finally, the development of ontology languages with additional expressive power is needed, as well as continued support for evolving, coordinating, and harmonizing ontologies.
How Will Scientists Work with the Literature in 2019?
Scientists will still read narrative prose, even as text mining and automated processing become common; however, these reading practices will become increasingly strategic, supported by enhanced literature and ontology-aware tools. As part of the publishing workflow, scientific terminology will be indexed routinely against rich ontologies. More importantly, formalized assertions, perhaps maintained in specialized "structured abstracts" (27), will provide indexing and browsing tools with computational access to causal and ontological relationships. Hypertext linking will be extensive, generated both automatically and by readers providing commentary on blogs and through shared annotation databases. At the same time, more tools for enhanced searching, scanning, and analyzing will appear and exploit the increasingly rich layer of indexing, linking, and annotation information. There are no technical obstacles to this trajectory, and it is already under way. The changes, as always, will be incremental: Scientists, who today already make extensive use of existing indexing and retrieval services, will encounter a steady stream of new enhancements and adopt those that allow rapid and productive engagement with the literature. The new functionality will sometimes be provided as part of the application interface (new features in PubMed, for instance) or as shared external tools that users can add to their Web browsers. These developments chart a middle course between the already obsolete activity of finding an article to read on the one hand, and the narrower objectives of text mining on the other, responding directly to the entrenched necessity and value of strategic reading in the daily work of today’s scientists.
References and Notes
08/29/2009 回国 最近好久没在这里码过中国字了，主要是因为太懒，转载比自己写容易多了，更别提是想要正经地写点什么了。耗到现在，回国一趟要是还不再冒个泡简直就是说不过去了，所以试着冒冒，然而已经是不习惯了。 从90度的北京回到70度的Toledo，身上清凉不少，脑子里也清爽多了：北京人太多了，天天出门都是乌泱乌泱的人在眼前晃，坐什么车都是人挤人，就算是打车也不过是稍微拉开人与人的间距，从紧贴着变成隔着个铁皮，照样还是在暴晒的街面上挤着动不了。唉，为什么我两年才回去一次，就先从牢骚开始呢。 回国的主要目的是看老爸老妈，主要的行动内容则是吃，然后就是说，总之一张嘴忙了20天，还是觉得没忙够，要是能再多吃点再多说点也还不会有啥怨言。从吃这个事儿就看出来咱国家是进步了，消费水平就算是合成美元也已经直追美国农村水平，我这穷学生平时肯定是不敢这么个吃法。老百姓就是琢磨点衣食住行，咱也都到了聚会话题总是固定在房子车子孩子的年龄，一个一个饭局上聊起这家长里短的琐事，让我觉得中国人民杠杠的消费热情真是红火，赶英超美四个字不过是小菜一碟罢了。 回国赶上了60年大庆前夕，那套红旗飘飘的国庆纪念明信片是个送人的好东西，据说还能盖个天安门的邮戳，估计过几天就能收到给自己的那份了。在家上网实在是不方便，google reader天天报错，从来也连不上，photo更是直接一屏的叉叉。我还非常倒霉地赶上台风刮断了中美电缆，弄得msn也上不去。当年我申请学校的时候就赶上台湾海底地震，中美email中断，这次又来了，我看下次我回国之前得先去找个庙烧注香才好。自己爬墙的技术已经荒废掉，也怕老爸在家莫名其妙爬过了墙再摔着，索性就这么与世隔绝了20天，有点到火星旅游的意思了。 另外一件回国的大事是拷电影，再次郑重感谢图有其表和我没有昵称，关于齐欣同志赞助的辎重，另有别人致谢，我就不管了。高清的就是好，别看一个片子要占4G空间，还是物有所值，昨天先拿watchman开刀，确实不错，效果不错片子也不错。 08/27/2009 zz Reshuffling Graduate Training
News FocusScience Education:Reshuffling Graduate TrainingJeffrey Mervis
Nobelist Roald Hoffmann believes that taking graduate students off grants and giving them fellowships would be good for U.S. science. But others say such a radical change isn't in the cards.
"I think science should be fun," Hoffmann said in May to the National Science Board, the oversight body for the National Science Foundation (NSF), when it awarded him its prestigious Public Service Medal. But after flashing pictures of himself at Carnival and on stage at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, Hoffmann got down to business: "Now I want to shift gears and talk about something serious." What Hoffmann wanted to discuss is a proposal for changing how the U.S. government supports the training of graduate students in the sciences. Federal research agencies now funnel most of their money for graduate students through grants to faculty members. That's the case for nearly 90% of the 39,000 graduate students whom NSF supports each year and for about two-thirds of those getting money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The remaining students are funded via fellowships, awarded directly to them, or through traineeships, in which universities compete for a grant to support a certain number of students in a particular area for a fixed period of time. The commingling of education and research has created a system that is the envy of the world in terms of research productivity. It's also not a bad deal for the student, who typically doesn't pay a penny to earn her Ph.D. The university picks up the tuition for her required courses, and her research is funded through a federal grant awarded to her adviser, who then hires her to work in his lab. In return, she'll probably teach some undergraduate classes during her first few semesters, after which her adviser will receive several years of skilled labor at below-market rates. But that wildly successful system comes at a high cost to both students and the profession, says Hoffmann, who also made his case in an 8 May editorial in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And it's not sustainable, he argues, especially during tough economic times like these. A better approach, says Hoffmann, would be for the government to stop supporting graduate students on research grants—roughly 30% of a typical NSF chemistry grant pays for graduate students, for example—and use the money for competitive fellowships that students could use at the university of their choice. That seemingly minor shift could have huge consequences for universities and for the entire U.S. research enterprise. Although they admit Hoffmann's proposal faces long odds, some community leaders say that such a change is long overdue and that his suggestion offers a promising road map. "The real power of an individual fellowship is that it empowers a young scientist to act in a more independent manner, on something creative and for which they have a passion," says Thomas Cech, a Nobelist who recently returned to academia after a decade as head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland. "And that's what science is really about." Under the current system, he says, "a graduate student is told, ‘Do experiment 2a because it's in our grant.’ That turns the student into a pair of hands. So I think a shift to fellowships would be an excellent idea." Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton University and chair of a 1998 National Academies panel that offered advice on career paths in the life sciences, says a move away from supporting graduate students on research grants would also address two other major flaws. Although the current system has succeeded in maximizing the amount of research performed, she says, it has also degraded the quality of graduate training and led to an overproduction of Ph.D.s in some areas. Unhitching training from research grants would be a much-needed form of professional "birth control," says Tilghman, who favors more federally funded traineeships. (Traineeships are grants awarded to institutions, which in turn promise to provide students with professional and career counseling as well as a chance to develop their scientific skills in specific areas.) Reducing the overall number of graduate students in the life sciences "is a price that I'd be willing to pay," she says, in return for a better training environment and improved job prospects. Fellowships already have a strong following. Building on a 2007 proposal from economist Richard Freeman of Harvard University, President Barack Obama has promised to triple by 2013 the annual number of NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships, which run for 3 years and cover all fields that NSF funds. And another newcomer to Washington, HHMI President Robert Tjian, hopes to revive a graduate fellowship program that the institute terminated in 2003 when money became tight. Tjian sees the program, which would be open to the most talented students from around the world who are studying in the United States, as an important investment in the next generation of academic researchers. However, other academic leaders worry that Hoffmann's proposal risks killing the goose that laid the golden egg. "Any radical shift away from what we do now is risky because it would jeopardize a strong innovation system," says Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington, D.C. Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, also thinks that a wholesale shift to fellowships would be unwise because it would take the selection of graduate students out of the hands of investigators. "In effect, by making awards to individual researchers, we are asking faculty members to find the best students," says Berdahl, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. "Presumably, there is a correlation between the quality of an individual [scientist] and the quality of the students in his or her lab."
A system out of balance
Hoffmann, a professor at Cornell University, says he began to think about the need for changing the current system during a series of recent departmental meetings on coping with the economic downturn. Most of the suggestions from faculty members, he concluded, would erode undergraduate instruction, about which he is passionate. Although Cornell officials say they are still working on a long-term plan, Hoffmann fears that a one-time, 5% cut in the chemistry department's operating budget starting this fall will be extended for 3 years and that the result will be larger classes, fewer instructors, and limits on enrollment in some courses. "We're firing some of our best teachers," he says. In contrast, he adds, research programs are likely to be unaffected because they are funded by federal dollars that are beyond the university's control. G. Peter Lepage, a physicist and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell, says every university is struggling to educate undergraduates and maintain a strong research program in the face of shrinking endowments, reduced state subsidies, and pressure to hold down tuition increases. Lepage says he doesn't see how Hoffmann's suggestions would help undergraduates, and he worries that they could harm research. "I have to make sure I have enough money to cover our teaching responsibilities [to undergraduates]," he says. "And we'll figure out a way to do that. At the same time, our faculty need graduate students to do their research, and we need to admit enough of them to do the research as well as to teach the courses."
Hoffmann readily admits that a shift to fellowships, which are now limited to U.S. citizens, would have one major unfortunate consequence: It would drain the graduate pool of most students from China, India, and other nations. Foreign students f ill a majority of the slots in many U.S. graduate programs in the natural sciences and engineering, but few could afford to come on their own dime. Hoffmann says he would regret losing those students but points to a silver lining. Having universities award fewer science Ph.D.s should force employers to pay higher salaries, he predicts, and attract more of the best U.S. students into science. Tjian's plan would extend a helping hand to foreign students as well. (As a private philanthropy, Hughes doesn't have to answer to the political argument that U.S. tax dollars should be spent on Americans.) But the Hughes program will serve only a tiny fraction of the foreign graduate students now in the country. Freeman, a labor economist who studies the dynamics of the scientific work force, sides with Cech and Hoffmann when it comes to the value of fellowships. However, Freeman thinks that Hoffmann's all-or-nothing plan ignores both economic and political realities. "We produce two things at our universities: education and science," says Freeman. "That's what society wants from us. And students will still want to work in a lab." Freeman says Hoffmann's suggestions would result in "more expensive science, and that means fewer people doing it. That's not consistent with where most policymakers think we should be headed as a country. ... I hate to reject something because it's radically different, but I think he needs to do a better job of modeling [the consequences]."
Getting the work done
What would fewer graduate students mean for research? Tilghman says that many scientists reacted in horror to the suggestion in her 1998 report that a typical 10-member lab might shed one graduate student as a way to reduce the overproduction of Ph.D.s and improve the quality of their training. "The PIs [principal investigators] told us that the lab's productivity would go way down if they left," she recalls. Tilghman is dubious. "I think that's highly debatable, and in any case, it's never been rigorously tested," she says. "Every scientist knows that graduate students often go through long periods in which they are totally unproductive."
At NIH, the bulk of the training programs are run by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Its director, Jeremy Berg, says he shares Hoffmann's concern about maintaining high-quality undergraduate and graduate programs in the face of mounting pressure from faculty members to maintain their research programs. "The biggest driver for the production of Ph.D.s is not the perception that there is an undersupply but rather that there's work that needs to be done," says Berg. "However, even if they are cheap, I'd argue that students are also smart, committed, and hard-working labor." Hoffmann says he assumes that a system of competitive fellowships would widen the already large gap between the elite universities and the rest of the nation's system of higher education, pointing to the fact that the top-20 research universities historically have attracted a disproportionate share of NSF's graduate research fellowships. Increasing that imbalance would bother him, he admits, but not enough to torpedo the idea.
A fellowships-only system, Gerbi says, would also lead to "wild swings in enrollment from one year to the next." On the other hand, say Gerbi and Tilghman, a shift to traineeships would reward universities that articulate a well-crafted approach to build up the talent pool in a particular area and also provide program stability.
Is that difference large enough to make fellowships unattractive to most universities? "I'd like to know" what administrators think about that, says Berg. Cech thinks the different overhead rates do influence how universities view support for graduate students. But he says those reimbursement rates aren't carved in stone. "There's no law that you can only give 10% in indirect costs for a fellowship," he argues. "You could make it 40%, on the grounds that they provide us with research results as well as training. Of course, that would cost more, so the money for training wouldn't go as far." Senior NSF officials actually considered a variation of Hoffmann's proposal several years ago, notes Esin Gulari, dean of science and engineering at Clemson University in South Carolina and a former head of engineering at NSF. The plan would have allowed researchers to request money for a certain number of traineeships as part of their grant application; at the same time, support for graduate students would be excluded from their grant. "But it never went further than that," says Gulari, now a member of the science board and part of Hoffmann's target audience. "We were so focused on increasing the size of the stipends" for existing fellowships, she says, that the question of shifting the balance between various modes of support was never addressed. Even those who agree with Hoffmann that changes are needed are not optimistic they will occur. Tilghman says the topic "is not high on the agenda" of most of her fellow university presidents. Instead, she's pinning her hopes on the heads of the various federal research agencies. But bringing about the changes Hoffmann has suggested, she adds, will require them to put the common good above the self-interest of their constituents, namely, individual scientists. "We need to care most about the health of the overall scientific enterprise," she says. "If your only perspective is attracting the labor to run your lab, then the status quo works very well."07/17/2009 zz Toward a Smarter Web
PerspectivesComputer Science:Toward a Smarter WebGregory S. Hornby1 and Tolga Kurtoglu2
1 University of California at Santa Cruz, University Affiliated Research Center, Mail Stop 269-3, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA. E-mail: gregory.s.hornby@nasa.gov; tolga.kurtoglu@nasa.gov Since its creation in the early 1990s, the World Wide Web has evolved from its initial, static Web sites to the dynamic, interactive Web sites of today. But whereas existing Web sites merely respond directly to user input, there is growing interest in making them adaptive through the use of computational intelligence. A promising approach for this involves a family of optimization techniques called evolutionary algorithms. A typical evolutionary algorithm (1) starts with an initial population of randomly generated, digital solutions to a problem ("individuals"). These individuals are evaluated with a user-supplied fitness function; on the basis of their fitness scores, better individuals are stochastically selected to act as "parents." Either one parent is copied while making a small change to it (mutation), or parts of two parents are combined to make a new individual (recombination). This breeding process is repeated for a fixed number of evaluations or until the problem has been solved.
Since the 1990s, evolutionary algorithms have been applied to architectural problems from arch dams and suspension bridges to building plans. In industrial and engineering design, they have found use in color design for knitwear, shape design for scissors, and car body styling, as well as for creating complex devices such as gyroscopes and wind turbines. Examples are the nose cone of Hitachi's Series N700 Bullet Train (2) and the communications antennas for the spacecraft in NASA's ST-5 mission, a test mission to validate new space technologies and study the magnetosphere (3). Traditional evolutionary algorithms optimize against explicit fitness functions, but problems involving taste or aesthetics cannot be easily reduced to a mathematical function of goodness. Instead, a human user can perform evaluation manually, as first proposed by Dawkins (4). Running on a standard PC, the first interactive evolutionary algorithm showed the user computer-generated images, of which the user would select one as the parent for the next generation. By iteratively selecting images on the basis of aesthetics, the algorithm produces more and more visually appealing images over time. This has become the standard interface for interactive evolutionary algorithms (see the figure). Since then, interactive evolutionary algorithms have been used in various human-computer interactive design systems. Most applications are visual, such as the evolution of images (5), three-dimensional shapes (6), and architectural forms (7), but they have also been used for musical tasks, including sound synthesis and composition. For example, GenJam is an interactive evolutionary algorithm for real-time jazz improvisation (8). Along with its creator, Al Biles, it forms a virtual jazz quintet that has performed at more than 100 private receptions. The first Web browser that supported images (Mosaic) was released in April 1993. Soon afterward, the first online interactive evolutionary algorithms appeared. The International Interactive Genetic Art 1 (IIGA1) (9) and its successor, IIGA2, had more than 100,000 visitors who collectively created thousands of images over a period of 4 years. In an early commercial application, Affinnova (www.affinnova.com) has used an interactive evolutionary algorithm–based system to design product packaging since 2000. Nymbler (www.nymbler.com) allows users to evolve baby names instead of images. A key challenge for interactive evolutionary algorithms is user fatigue (10). For typical noninteractive evolutionary algorithms, tens of thousands of evaluations are needed to achieve interesting results—orders of magnitude more than can be expected from a single user. On the Web, many users are available, but even this multiplier effect may not overcome user fatigue: Because the interactions are distributed in time, no single user is likely to experience evolution at a sufficiently fast pace for it to be interesting. Given that user fatigue limits the number of interactions, one must make the most of what little data the user provides. The main approach to this is to automate most design evaluations and only selectively query the user. For parameterized design spaces (11), function approximation techniques can be used to assign a goodness score, based on similar designs evaluated by the user. But creating an adequate approximation is difficult, and this approach does not generalize to more open-ended, generative representations (11) for encoding designs. Another approach—using mathematical heuristics of aesthetics—has found some success in the interactive evolution of jewelry (12). The most promising long-term approach is to continuously learn and refine a model of user preferences (13) while simultaneously using this model to perform most evaluations. The interactive systems described above explicitly present the user with choices to select from. Interactive evolutionary algorithms on the Web can also be invisible to the user. For example, the company SnapAds (www.snapads.com) uses an implicit interactive evolutionary algorithm to evolve banner ads. Variations of an ad are placed on Web pages. On the basis of click-through rates, the ad layout evolves and is optimized over the course of a few days. With this approach, the company has improved click-through rates by as much as 1900% (14). The challenge in extending such implicit algorithms to other Web applications will be to convert user interactions into a fitness assignment. As interactive evolutionary algorithms improve and are adopted by Web site developers, we expect them to become increasingly useful for adding intelligence to interactive Web sites. Web sites with explicit interactive evolutionary algorithms could allow users to custom-design products by interactively browsing through virtual catalogs that evolve as users surf through them. Implicit algorithms could enable search engines to adaptively improve their responses to search queries over time and produce user-customized responses. This intelligent Web of the future will not just be powered by better algorithms, but will emerge from the interactions of millions of online users.
References and Notes
07/16/2009 zz Open Access Series
LettersOpen Access: Increased Citations Not GuaranteedIn their Brevia "Open access and global participation in science" (20 February, p. 1025), J. A. Evans and J. Reimer report a small but significant citation effect (about 8%) that they attribute to free access to the scientific literature. However, Evans and Reimer only measure the effect of open access where publishing is concerned, such as when a journal makes articles freely available after a period of delay (1). They ignore other sources of open-access articles, such as when authors pay to make their articles freely available in subscription-access journals (2) or use self-archiving. In a randomized controlled trial of open-access publishing, we were unable to detect a citation advantage that could be attributed to access status, although we did observe that open-access articles received more article downloads from more visitors (3).Philip M. Davis E-mail: pmd8@cornell.edu Department of Communication, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
References
LettersOpen Access: The Self-Selection EffectIn the Brevia "Open access and global participation in science" (20 February, p. 1025), J. A. Evans and J. Reimer claim that open access—i.e., free and unrestricted online access to scientific publications—has little influence on research attention, as measured by article citation frequency. Their claim is questionable, however, because it assumes that open access is a randomly assigned journal attribute, whereas it is actually assigned by publishers according to their objectives and the characteristics of the journal.Large, established, widely distributed journals naturally attract important papers and are, consequently, highly cited. Converting such journals to open access will likely cause a fall in revenue unmatched by a comparable rise in impact, making conversion an unappealing option. Publishers of new stand-alone journals face a different situation. Unless they have a captive market, such as a learned society, they will likely have difficulty selling subscriptions. In such cases, open access appears to offer the best hope for gaining both visibility and a stream of contributions. Although the Evans and Reimer study indicates little about the influence of open access on the impact of otherwise similar journals, it does establish that, with open access, new journals can be as effective as the old in gaining readership for the work that they publish. This means that established journals have no inherent monopoly over the literature and that the creation of effective new options for distributing research findings remains possible. Alfred N. Burdett E-mail: alfredburdett@heronpublishing.com Heron Publishing, 202-3994 Shelbourne Street, Victoria, BC V8N 3E2, Canada.
LettersOpen Access: The Sooner the BetterIn the Brevia "Open access and global participation in science" (20 February, p. 1025), J. A. Evans and J. Reimer argue that a research article published online is only modestly (8%) more likely to be cited if it is freely available. This result would seem to cast doubt on one important argument in favor of free access—that it will increase the visibility of a paper to colleagues.However, the 8% statistic that Evans and Reimer highlight is misleading. The authors' supporting online material (figure S1C) clearly shows that the impact of free access on citations is heavily dependent on the age of the article at the time free access was provided. In particular, when articles were made freely available within 2 years of publication, their citations increased by almost 20%. This far more dramatic effect is the one scientists and journals should consider when deciding when to provide free access. If this decision is to be made purely on the basis of citation impact, the upward trend of the curve in figure S1C argues strongly in favor of minimal delays. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell exactly how short a delay the data support, because the underlying citation information is not provided. That the raw data for such a provocative paper is unavailable is an astonishing violation of the norms of science, and the explicitly stated publication policies of Science. Michael Eisen1,* and Steven Salzberg2 * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mbeisen@berkeley.edu
1 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
LettersOpen Access: The Sooner the BetterEditor's Note: It is Science policy, as stated in our online information to contributors, that "After publication, all data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science." However, we do not preclude our authors from obtaining data from commercial sources when those are the only sources of the data and when those data are available to the scientific community.
Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Chief
LettersResponse—Open AccessDavis accurately observes that our analysis of open access only accounts for scientific literature provided by publishers. We chose to analyze when journal volumes come online through publisher Web sites because publishers do not select specific articles for availability; instead, they select a batch of articles (one or more years'worth) based on duration since publication. The difficulty with analyzing the open-access effect for articles that authors have paid or taken pains to post freely is that authors likely select the best articles. Moreover, in author-pays and self-archiving analyses, articles cannot be compared with themselves over time—they must be compared with other articles that were not selected. As a result, they report large open-access effects—from 100% (1) to 286% (2). A reanalysis of one of these studies using instrumental variables to predict whether authors paid the open-access fee suggests that much of the purported open-access effect comes from author selection (3).Davis recommends his recent open-access experiment with 11 physiology journals that finds no open-access effect (4). Truly randomized, article-level experiments would offer an improvement over current studies. The problem with Davis's experiment, however, is that it introduces another level of selection suggested by Burdett's letter: Established private journals like Nature or Cell would never consider opening their content for an open-access experiment. Journals that do are often sponsored by scientific societies and post a much smaller sticker price. Consider that the average price per article in Davis' sample of journals is $3.39 relative to $14.55 for all 66 physiology titles indexed by Thomson's Web of Science and includes the eight least expensive journals (the average price in our open access sample was $10.28). It should not be surprising that the cheapest journals post an indiscernible open-access effect. This illustration validates Burdett's criticism of our analysis: The modest open-access effect we report derives from the subset of journal volumes that are at some but not all points in the public domain by 2004. The effect would likely be larger if the most expensive journals from private publishers had made their holdings available freely. Eisen argues that the 8% open-access effect we report is misleading because he interprets our figure S1C to suggest that the effect is larger in recent years. A methodological challenge described in our supporting online material cautions against this interpretation. Our analysis relies on estimates of what citations would have been in the absence of online access. Article citations typically trace a log-normal distribution, with a steep rise in citations followed by a gradual fall (5). Whether one models this path explicitly, as we do, or simply uses the prior year's citations, as we show in our supporting material, the estimates become less accurate as you approach the present. For very recent years, these calculations underestimate expected citations because this is when the citation trend rises most steeply. This produces an inflated estimate of the influence of free and commercial online availability, exacerbated because journals that become open access do so disproportionately in the last years of our study. Burdett suggests that new journals can gain quick access to the market for ideas through an open-access model. Our published analysis could not directly support this claim—our estimation excluded journals online at publication—but additional models available from the author provide strong support for it. The only reasonable explanation is that, following Eisen, the culture of modern science and scholarship values the open-access ideal (6). The irony is not lost on us that we published a paper about open access whose data is not open access. It was collected and is owned by private companies. It is, however, widely available and licensed to thousands of research institutions internationally for those who would reassemble it and improve upon our analyses. James A. Evans E-mail: jevans@uchicago.edu Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
References
07/02/2009 zz Building an Open Cloud
PerspectivesComputer Science:Building an Open CloudMichael R. NelsonCommunication, Culture and Technology Program, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA. E-mail: mnelson@pobox.com The Internet is entering an exciting, third phase, as important as its second phase, the World Wide Web. Thanks to paradigms for distributed computing such as Web 2.0, Web Services, and Software as a Service, the Internet is becoming a platform for computing as well as communications. This new platform, the Cloud (1), is a many-to-many medium that can link millions of users to thousands of computers simultaneously (see the figure). It represents a fundamental shift in how computing is done. To quote Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, "We're moving into the era of ‘cloud’ computing, with information and applications hosted in the diffuse atmosphere of cyberspace rather than on specific processors and silicon racks. The network will truly be the computer" (2). In Cloud computing, users rely on data and software that both reside on the Internet. Typical applications include Google Apps for word processing, virtual worlds such as Second Life that enable users to build three-dimensional environments, and grid computing. Cloud computing has the potential to be widely adopted because it can reduce the cost and the power required to do routine computing tasks and computationally intensive research problems (3), foster collaboration, and dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of developing new applications. Without the economies of scale enabled by Cloud computing, it will be increasingly difficult to deal with growing data and traffic volumes: A factor of >30 increase in the total amount of traffic on the Internet by 2015 is anticipated (4), and the total amount of research data available online will grow even more (5). It is feasible that within the next 5 years, more than 80% of the world's computing and data storage could occur "in the Cloud." But many things will affect how, and how quickly, the Cloud will develop. We are at a critical point in the development of the Internet (6). The standards and policy framework for the Cloud will be defined in the next 2 or 3 years. If this is not done properly, in a way that enables innovation and competition, the full potential of Cloud computing may never be realized. A number of challenges must be addressed, including open standards, collaboration between cloud service providers, security and privacy, online copyright, liability, user resistance, organizational inertia, and law enforcement and national security concerns. Cloud computing has reached a point in its evolution similar to where the World Wide Web was in 1993: The key standards are in place, the first exciting commercial applications are taking off, there are concerns about security, and, most important, it is not clear how and where this new, disruptive technology will be applied. But it is clear that decisions taken now by businesses and governments could limit the options and opportunities. The research and library communities have a key role to play in shaping the development of the Cloud, just as they did with the Web in the mid-1990s (7). They were early adopters of the technology, helping to find solutions to concerns about Web security and privacy. They pushed for an interoperable Web that was based on open standards and open-source software. Users rejected efforts to create proprietary browser standards that would have segmented the World Wide Web by requiring the use of a particular Web browser to reach certain Web sites viewable only with that browser (8). These communities need to play a similar role today.
I see three possible scenarios for the Cloud. The first, the "Many Clouds" scenario, will result if a handful of companies are able to take advantage of economies of scale, proprietary standards, and government policies to control the market. They are likely to create separate, unconnected cloud platforms based on proprietary technologies. This scenario would provide some efficiencies, but it would be very difficult for data and software on one company's cloud to be combined with that from another cloud. The potential for new applications and closer collaboration would thus be lost. The second scenario, "Hazy Skies," would still be dominated by large cloud service providers using proprietary systems. Data, but not software, could move between the different clouds. Common middleware, such as single sign-on authentication, would be absent, making it difficult for users to combine data and services operating in different clouds. The third scenario, the "Open Cloud" (or "Blue Skies"), would use open standards, open interfaces, and open-source software to enable thousands of different organizations to link their infrastructure into a single, global Cloud. The Cloud would be like the Internet, a "network of networks" made up of more than 100,000 different subsystems run by different companies and organizations. This scenario would maximize collaboration, enabling users to assemble software and data into services that meet their particular needs. New authentication, security, and privacy-enhancing technologies could then be deployed throughout the cloud (9). In order to understand how the cloud is developing, we need accurate data on how Cloud computing is being used, as well as economic and social science research on innovation sparked by the Cloud. In addition, policy makers need advice on how existing telecommunication and information policy should be adapted so as not to slow its adoption. In the 1980s, the Internet user community, and academic researchers in particular, worked to ensure that the Internet became a truly interoperable "network of networks" (10). Users embraced the Internet Protocol, which was based on open standards and could be implemented in open-source software. By adopting Cloud services built using similar open standards, users can provide a counterforce to the tendency of companies to differentiate their service by using proprietary technologies and to lock in customers. Numerous organizations and companies have embraced the Open Cloud, including the Open Grid Forum (11), the Open Science Grid (12), an academic consortium (13) led by Google and IBM, and almost 200 companies and organizations that have endorsed the Open Cloud Manifesto (14). However, a number of forces are arrayed against the development of an Open Cloud. Governments wishing to censor the information that their citizens can view online and the services that they can use may try to limit access to and development of the Open Cloud. Poorly designed efforts to increase Internet security could limit the flexibility needed for the Cloud to grow and evolve (15). Proposals to impose filtering requirements on Internet service providers in order to detect the transmission of copyrighted material could eliminate many of the potential benefits of the Cloud. Government procurements could either foster open Cloud standards or, by favoring one or two vendors, increase the likelihood of the Many Clouds or Hazy Skies scenarios. The academic and research communities can use their role as "early adopters," the results of their economics and policy research, and their access to the media to highlight the need for policies and practices that favor the development of an Open Cloud, interoperability, and competition. References
06/23/2009 zz After Outcry, Government Backpedals Over Internet-Filtering Software
News of the WeekChina:After Outcry, Government Backpedals Over Internet-Filtering SoftwareHao XinLast week, the Chinese government provoked a firestorm of criticism when it announced that starting 1 July, all computers sold in China must have a new software program meant to filter pornographic images and block content that offends government sensibilities, such as discussion of the banned sect Falun Gong. But scientists whose work was the basis for text filtering are distancing themselves from the controversial software. And as Science went to press, it appeared that the government may not force computer users to run the "censorware" after all. China's information ministry spent $6.1 million last year on a 1-year license of an Internet-filtering software that dynamically blocks Web sites by detecting "harmful" images and text for "constructing a green, healthy, harmonious network environment and protecting the healthy growth of youths," according to the published government procurement notice. After requiring installation of the Lü Ba-Hua Ji Hu Hang (Green Dam-Youth Escort) software on all school computers and on computers sent to the countryside, the ministry had intended to impose protection on all of China's 300 million netizens—who already face government censorship of the Internet. But even state media have turned against Green Dam-Youth Escort, questioning its value. And Chinese lawyers have called for public hearings on the information ministry's directive, which they assert may violate China's antimonopoly law. Netters who have tested Green Dam, developed by the firm Zhengzhou Jin Hui in Henan, say that it blocks many harmless pictures while letting some pornographic ones pass. If Green Dam finds a certain number (preset by the user) of objectionable images on a Web site, it automatically adds the address to its blacklist and blocks access to the site from that computer until it is reset by the password holder. In a test conducted by Science, Green Dam added The Wall Street Journal Web site to the blacklist because it detected too many "harmful" images, including a picture of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Huang's former Ph.D. student, Jin Yao-hong, wrote the original demonstration software as an HNC application and invented "standpoint filtering" in the early 2000s. Jin has described the filtering as "based on the standpoint of the article, filter reactionary speech." For example, the software can detect whether the phrase "Falun Gong" appears in a complimentary or derogatory context. Da Zheng developed this software into Youth Escort, says Jin, who adds that "how the company will use it is out of our control." Halderman found that entering "Falun Gong" in combination with certain words in Notepad, a basic Windows text editor, triggered filtering and that the program closed abruptly. At a press briefing last week, foreign ministry spokesperson Qin Gang said that the government's goal is to prevent information harmful to the public from spreading on the Internet. However, earlier this week, an information ministry official told the state-owned newspaper China Daily that people would not be compelled to run the Green Dam-Youth Escort that comes with new computers. The ministry did not respond to requests from Science for an unfiltered explanation. 06/20/2009 终于见到夏天了昨天热的够呛，终于有点夏天的味道了，但是晚上一场雷雨弄得今天早晨又是凉风习习。
今年的牵牛花工程不怎么成功，至今还只长了一两对叶子出来，去年这个时候可能都开花了。不知道是因为今年天气太凉，还是因为自己结的种子质量不如买的好。但是今年的辣椒和西红柿工程很成功，现在已经结了一个杏子那么大的绿西红柿了，眼看着还有几个也要陆续结果，真是期待啊。辣椒才长了几厘米就准备开始开花结果。这次买的是超级辣的jalapeno，只要结上两个就足够炒一盘青椒土豆丝的，加油吧！ 06/16/2009 zz Charting the heavens from ChinaBooks and ArtsNature 459, 778-779 (11 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/459778a; Published online 10 June 2009 Charting the heavens from ChinaJane Qiu1 ARTS REVIEWED: -The Dunhuang Star ChartThe British Library, London 
BRITISH LIBRARY, OR.8210/S.3326 The three stars that make up the familiar 'belt' of Orion are recognizable in this panel from the seventh-century star chart discovered near Dunhuang, China. Along the ancient trade route of the Silk Road connecting China and the West, the Mogao Caves honeycomb the Mingsha Hill some 25 kilometres southeast of Dunhuang, a desert town in Gansu province. Excavated between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, the caves were Buddhist shrines and temples where travellers prayed for the success of their journeys. In 1900, the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu propelled the Mogao Caves to the status of an archaeological crown jewel when he stumbled upon a hidden library in Cave 17. It contained more than 40,000 manuscripts on a myriad of subjects, from religion, history, art and literature to mathematics, medicine and economics. The documents had been sealed in the cave by Buddhist monks in the eleventh century. Among the manuscripts was an exquisite star chart. It shows the entire sky as visible from China, skilfully drawn by hand in red and black inks onto a fine, four-metre-long paper scroll. In 1907, archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein took the chart and more than 7,000 other cave manuscripts to the British Museum in London. Dated to between 649 and 684 ad, the chart is the oldest extant graphical star atlas in the world, explains Susan Whitfield, director of the British Library's International Dunhuang Project, which aims to make information and images about the artefacts available on the Internet. The atlas is on display at the British Library in London this summer to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy. The atlas is divided into two sections. One shows 26 drawings of differently shaped clouds accompanied by text on cloud divination. The other section portrays 12 star maps, each depicting a 30 ° division of the sky in the east–west direction, plus a map of the circumpolar sky. The star positions are drawn as observed from a latitude of 34° N, possibly from the Imperial Observatory in Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) or another site in Luoyang. The atlas shows 1,339 stars arranged in 257 groups, or asterisms, two of which resemble the constellations of the Big Dipper and Orion. It includes faint stars that are difficult to see with the naked eye, and several in the Southern Hemisphere. The styles of the dots differentiate the three schools of astronomical tradition established during the Warring States period (476–221 bc), each of which adopted alternative names and descriptions for the star groups. The positions of the brightest stars are surprisingly accurate to within a few degrees, says astronomer Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud of the CEA, the French Atomic Energy Commission, who has studied the atlas together with Whitfield and Françoise Praderie of the Paris Observatory (J.-M. Bonnet-Bidaud , F. Praderie and S. Whitfield J. Astron. Hist. Herit. 12, 39–59; 2009). Stars near the celestial horizon are drawn using a cylindrical projection, in which meridians are mapped to equally spaced vertical lines, and circles of latitude are mapped to horizontal lines. The circumpolar region uses an azimuthal projection, preserving the directions of the stars from a central point. These methods are still used in geographical mapping today. Ancient Chinese astronomers divided the celestial circle into 12 sections to follow the orbit of Jupiter, known as the Year Star in China, which loops the Sun about every 12 years. The Jupiter cycle is also the basis for the 12 months of the year that make up the Chinese calendar. On the Dunhuang chart, the text accompanying each star map names that region of sky, the astrological predictions associated with it and the states of the Chinese empire thought to be influenced by that division. The chart may have been reproduced from an earlier atlas by tracing it on to fine paper. It has no coordinate grid, and shares wording with another traditional astronomical text, Yue Ling, or Monthly Ordinances, which has been dated to around 300 bc. Yet it remains the earliest-surviving detailed map of the entire northern sky, pre-dating others by several centuries. Older star maps described only part of the sky. The Book of Fixed Stars, an Arabic work written by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (903–986 ad), displays individual constellations but gives no information on their relative positions. The oldest-known star chart in Europe is the Vienna manuscript. Dated to 1440 ad, it shows only a limited number of stars in northern constellations, plotted in an azimuthal projection from the ecliptic pole. The chart may have been used to consult the heavens to predict earthly events. Astronomy was an imperial science in ancient China, and court astronomers and astrologers created star charts from at least the fifth century bc. Chinese emperors sought celestial clues for political and warfare decisions, and the importance of divination led to an early precision in star catalogues. But why was the chart kept in the Mogao Caves rather than in the imperial archive? "It remains a mystery," says Whitfield. A political and secret document, it may have served a military purpose rather than being a guide for travellers. When the Taoist priest discovered the hidden library, he could hardly have guessed that he was opening the door to a world of such fascinating antiquity. See http://www.nature.com/astro09 for more on the International Year of Astronomy.
06/11/2009 open access，未尽的争论新闻引自http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090408/full/458690a.html，
及其回应http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7247/full/459641a.html Published online 7 April 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/458690a News Open-access policy flourishes at NIHResearchers, institutions and publishers have complied with the mandate, but it still has its opponents. One year on, advocates of free public access to scientific literature are calling a law that requires researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their manuscripts publicly available at the PubMed Central repository a success. At the same time, the measure continues to be challenged by a senior congressman and some publishers. Since the legal requirement that NIH-funded researchers make their manuscripts publicly available after acceptance for journal publication came into effect last April, the number of articles being approved by their authors for processing by the repository has more than tripled. In March 2009, 6,425 such original articles were approved by their authors for processing; a year earlier, the number was 1,852 (see graph). The articles become available through PubMed Central no more than a year after their journal publication. Author compliance "has been dramatically altered" by converting an "anaemic" voluntary policy into law, says former NIH director Harold Varmus, now president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a keen supporter of open-access initiatives. But the policy still has opponents. "This so-called 'open access' policy was not subject to open hearings, open debate or open amendment in Congress," John Conyers (Democrat, Michigan), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote on The Huffington Post website last month (he declined to be interviewed for this article). In February, Conyers re-introduced a bill from the last congressional session that would amend US copyright law to forbid the NIH making funding conditional on manuscripts being publicly accessible. However, congressional observers say that the bill has little chance of going anywhere this year. Open-access policies have caught on around the world in recent years. Britain's Wellcome Trust, the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS), the European Research Council and many others have implemented similar mandates, including all seven UK research councils. Disease groups such as the high-profile US foundation Autism Speaks have done the same, as have the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Faculty of Arts andSciences at Harvard University. The reason that the policy has succeeded at the NIH "is that there has been cooperation — whether they wanted to [comply] or not — by grantees, by extramural staff, by the universities and by publishers", says David Lipman, director of the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Maryland. He believes that the new requirement is at least partly responsible for the increased use of PubMed Central; there were approximately 550,000 articles downloaded from the site in March 2008, and 680,000 last month.  Congressman John Conyers has tabled a bill to challenge the NIH open-access requirement.M. Wilson/Getty ImagesMuch of the increase in author participation has occurred since the autumn, when the NIH began e-mailing reminders about the new requirement to investigators submitting grant proposals or progress reports that cited agency-funded papers lacking PubMed Central identifiers. "We expect every paper falling under the NIH public-access policy to be posted to PubMed Central, and we are reviewing every NIH award to make sure that happens," says Neil Thakur, who oversees the policy for the NIH's Office of Extramural Research. However, opposition to the law persists among some publishers. "What is being done by this policy is imposing a specific model of publication that we think the government has no business imposing," says Allan Adler, legal counsel for the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in Washington DC. (Nature is a member of the AAP but cooperates with and supports the NIH on open access.) Because of the delay of up to a year on NIH uploads to PubMed Central, it is difficult at this stage to gauge the impact of the policies on societies and other publishers that rely heavily on subscriptions for revenue. The recession is driving down endowments and with them library budgets, leading independently to some degree of subscription cancellations. Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an advocacy group in Washington DC with an open-access agenda, says that the consortium's members are reporting large-scale cuts in journal subscriptions. "But they are across disciplines, completely due to the economic meltdown and not the NIH policy," she adds. But Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society in Bethesda, says that "in an environment where access is readily available whether after 12 months or 6 months or immediately, the subscription model starts wobbling". Frank predicts that, as subscription revenues tank, publishers will be forced to levy stiff fees on authors for publishing. He notes that the open-access journal group the Public Library of Science has boosted its publication fees for PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology from US$1,500 in 2006 to $2,950 today; the author fees for four of its other five journals have risen to $2,300. ADVERTISEMENT  And last week, the formerly open-access Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) abruptly switched to a subscription model, charging individuals $99 per month and larger institutions up to $2,400 per year. "While we do support open access — we think it's a great idea — we simply cannot survive with the open-access model, at least now," says Moshe Pritsker, JoVE's editor-in-chief and co-founder. Scientists seem to be coping with the changes, although there are some grumblings. "I don't have any complaints about the procedures. They are pretty user-friendly," says Carol Mason, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York. When she published a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience last month, the journal submitted the paper to PubMed Central for her. After receiving an e-mail from the NIH, it took her "a couple of minutes" to click through a step-by-step guide and log into the processing system, and another 15 minutes to review the attached PDF of her paper before hitting 'approve'. Corrected:There is a Correction associated with this article (Nature 458, 819; 2009). The number of articles downloaded from PubMed Central represent the average usage on a typical weekday, not a monthly total as we state.
CorrespondenceNature 459, 641 (4 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/459641a; Published online 3 June 2009 Fair-use policies aim to balance access and cost of publishingH. Frederick Dylla1
SirYour News story 'Open-access policy flourishes at NIH' (Nature 458, 690–691; 2009) raises the related question for publishers about the challenges inherent in providing the widest and most cost-effective access to quality scientific literature. At the non-profit American Institute of Physics, we (like other publishers) are concerned about the inescapable realities of accomplishing this aim. The reality is that publishing a quality journal costs money. The trade-off is that those costs add value to a researcher's manuscript as it evolves from a draft submission to a final publication. In our case, this transformation process requires peer review by tens of thousands of experts annually, as well as editing by postdoctoral physicists, refining of text and graphics, and use of increasingly sophisticated indexing and archiving measures. Government-mandated open-access policies will impose unintended negative consequences if they threaten the very business models that pay for quality publications. Such mandates may not be necessary. We and other publishers are voluntarily developing copyright-friendly, fair-use policies that obviate the access issue. Harvard and the American Physical Society, for example, recently agreed on ways to facilitate authors' compliance with Harvard's new open-access policies when publishing in distinguished journals such as Physical Review, Physical Review Letters and Reviews of Modern Physics. Even in the information age, maintaining the quality of the scientific literature costs money. How we can continue to improve access to scientific journals without compromising their quality is a question about which we should all be concerned. Nature Publishing Group (NPG) provides a free manuscript deposition service at http://tinyurl.com/mq4mx2, to enable authors to comply with funders' mandates. NPG's licence-to-publish policy is at http://tinyurl.com/4etxvz Cancer screening for women in developing countries. 06/02/2009 zz A change of strategy in the war on cancerEssayNature 459, 508-509 (28 May 2009) | doi:10.1038/459508a; Published online 27 May 2009 A change of strategy in the war on cancerRobert A. Gatenby1
Top of page AbstractPatients and politicians anxiously await and increasingly demand a 'cure' for cancer. But trying to control the disease may prove a better plan than striving to cure it, says Robert A. Gatenby.  J. H. VAN DIERENDONCK The German Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich introduced the concept of 'magic bullets' more than 100 years ago: compounds that could be engineered to selectively target and kill tumour cells or disease-causing organisms without affecting the normal cells in the body. The success of antibiotics 50 years later seemed to be a strong validation of Ehrlich's idea. Indeed, so influential and enduring was medicine's triumph over bacteria that the 'war on cancer' continues to be driven by the implicit assumption that magic bullets will one day be found for the disease. Yet lessons learned in dealing with exotic species, combined with recent mathematical models of the evolutionary dynamics of tumours, indicate that eradicating most disseminated cancers may be impossible. And, more importantly, trying to do so could make the problem worse.
In 1854, the year Ehrlich was born, the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella, was first observed in Illinois. Within five decades, the moth, whose larvae feed on vegetables such as cabbage and Brussels sprouts, had spread throughout North America. It now infests the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia. Attempts to eradicate it using various chemicals suppressed populations only fleetingly and, in the late 1980s, biologists found strains resistant to all known insecticides. Over the past couple of decades, agriculturalists have abandoned efforts to eliminate the diamondback moth. Instead, most now apply insecticides only when infestation exceeds some threshold level with the goal of producing a sustainable and satisfactory crop. Under the banner of 'integrated pest management', hundreds of invasive species are now successfully controlled with strategies that restrict population growth. By contrast, very few such species have been eradicated. An infestation of the giant African snail, Achatina fulica, was eliminated in Miami, Florida, in the 1960s, for instance. But the snail is easy to catch and, in this case, it had spread to only a few city blocks. Two centuries of experience have shown that the vast majority of introduced species are simply too heterogeneous, too dispersed and too adaptive to be eliminated. Adapt and conquerThe dynamics of exotic species and invasive cancers differ in many obvious and subtle ways, yet there are important similarities. The invasion of pests involves dispersal, proliferation, migration and evolution — all of which are analogous to the processes that allow cancer cells to spread from a primary tumour into adjacent tissues or to new locations in the body via the lymphatic system or blood vessels. Furthermore, the ability of tumour cells to adapt to a wide range of environmental conditions, including to toxic chemicals, is very similar to the evolutionary capacities shown by invasive species. As with invasive species, for disseminated cancers, successful eradication is rare. Hodgkin's lymphoma, testicular cancer and acute myeloid leukaemia can be consistently cured using aggressive chemotherapy. But, like the African snail, these malignant cells seem to have characteristics that make them particularly responsive to 'treatment'. Some are unusually homogeneous, for example, so have limited capacity to adapt. Eradicating the large, diverse and adaptive populations found in most cancers presents a formidable challenge. One centimetre cubed of cancer contains about 109 transformed cells and weighs about 1 gram, which means there are more cancer cells in 10 grams of tumour than there are people on Earth. Unequal cell division and differences in genetic lineages and microenvironmental selection pressures mean that the cells within a tumour are diverse both in genetic make-up and observable characteristics. Additionally, tumours are complex ecosystems: they include normal cells as well as regions of low blood flow and oxygen content where cancer cells are relatively protected from the effects of chemotherapy. If blood flow is poor, for example, so is the delivery of the toxic drugs. Outwitted by evolutionThe typical goal in cancer therapy, similar to that of antimicrobial treatments, is killing as many tumour cells as possible under the assumption that this will, at best, cure the disease and, at worst, keep the patient alive for as long as possible. Indeed, for more than 50 years, oncologists have tried to find ways to administer ever-larger doses of ever-more cytotoxic therapy. But, just as invasive species consistently adapt to pesticides, regardless of concentration or cleverness of design, so too do cancerous cells adapt to therapies. Indeed, the parallels between cancerous cells and invasive species suggest that the principles for successful cancer therapy might lie not in the magic bullets of microbiology but in the evolutionary dynamics of applied ecology. Support for this idea comes from in vivo experiments, computer simulations and recently developed mathematical models of tumour evolutionary dynamics. These suggest that efforts to eliminate cancers may actually hasten the emergence of resistance and tumour recurrence, thus reducing a patient's chances of survival1. The reason for this arises from a component of tumour biology not ordinarily investigated: the cost of resistance to treatment. Cancer cells pay a price when they evolve resistance to a particular treatment. For instance, to cope with chemotherapy, a cancer cell may increase its rate of DNA repair, or actively pump the drug out across the cell membrane. In targeted therapies, in which drugs interfere with the molecular signalling needed for proliferation and survival, a cell might adapt by activating or upregulating alternative pathways. All these strategies use up energy that would otherwise be available for invasion into non-cancerous tissues or proliferation, and so reduce the fitness of the cell. And the more complex and costly the mechanisms used, the less fit the resistant population will be. That cancer cells pay a cost for resistance is supported by several observations. Cells in laboratory cultures that are resistant to chemotherapies and to tyrosine kinase inhibitors, a form of targeted therapy, typically lose their resistance when the chemicals are removed2. In cell lines identical except for their sensitivity to tyrosine kinase inhibitors, resistant populations typically grow more slowly than sensitive ones. Lung cancer cells resistant to the chemotherapy gemcitabine are less proliferative, invasive and motile than their drug-sensitive counterparts3, 4. Also, although resistant forms are commonly found in tumours that haven't yet been exposed to treatment, they generally occur in small numbers5. This suggests that the resistant cells are not so unfit as to be completely out-competed by the drug-sensitive ones, but that they struggle to proliferate when both types are present.
Our models show that in the absence of therapy, cancer cells that haven't evolved resistance will proliferate at the expense of the less-fit resistant ones. And, when a large number of the sensitive cells are killed, for instance by aggressive therapies, the resistant types are able to proliferate unconstrained. This means that high doses of chemotherapy might actually increase the likelihood of a tumour becoming unresponsive to further therapy. So, just as the judicious use of pesticides can be used to successfully control invasive species, a therapeutic strategy explicitly designed to maintain a stable, tolerable tumour volume could increase a patient's survival by allowing sensitive cells to suppress the growth of resistant ones. To test this idea, we treated a human ovarian cancer, grown in mice, with conventional high-dose chemotherapy1. The cancer rapidly regressed but then recurred and killed the mice. Yet when we treated the mice with a drug dose continuously adjusted to maintain a stable tumour volume, the animals, although not cured, survived. The body's predatorsDesigning therapies to sustain a stable tumour mass rather than eradicate all cancer cells will require a long-term, multilayered strategy that looks beyond the immediate cytotoxic effects of any one treatment. Researchers will need to establish the mechanisms by which cancer cells achieve resistance and what it costs them. They will also need to understand the evolutionary dynamics of resistant populations, and design strategies to suppress or exploit the adapted characteristics. An obvious problem is the accumulation of toxicity in patients exposed to prolonged, albeit lower, levels of drugs. But in parallel with the diverse array of predators and pathogens currently used to control invasive species, the immune system offers a rich potential source of 'predators' such as T lymphocytes that could sustain a stable cancer population — both by killing tumour cells and selecting for fitness-lowering adaptations. I am not suggesting that cancer researchers should abandon their search for ever-more-effective cancer therapies, or even for cures. However, instead of focusing exclusively on a glorious victory, they should address the possible benefits of an uneasy stalemate in appropriate situations. Even now, many oncologists agree in principle that therapeutic strategies aimed at controlling cancer could prove more effective than trying to cure it. But the idea of killing not the maximum number of tumour cells possible but the fewest necessary will be difficult for both physicians and patients to accept in practice. Certainly in a war that is steeped in the tradition of magic bullets and all-out attacks with high-dose chemotherapy, such an approach may seem defeatist. However, in battles against cancer, magic bullets may not exist and evolution dictates the rules of engagement. Top of page References
05/24/2009 意大利肉丸子
原料： 1斤 瘦牛肉馅 1/2 杯 面包屑 1/3 杯 水 1/4 杯 cheese碎 1个 洋葱，中等大小 蒜、盐、胡椒 意大利西红柿酱 先用一些水打肉馅 不要放太多，否则后边烤的时候会出汤 
 洋葱切碎，越碎越好 面包片烤一下，然后撮成碎渣 面包边比较硬，去掉不要了
 然后把所有材料跟肉馅混起来 cheese、洋葱、面包渣、盐、蒜粉、胡椒粉 
 下手拌匀
 然后再团成小丸子 大概5厘米直径吧，一斤肉馅团了23个出来 把丸子排在烤盘上
 所有丸子进烤箱，boil档10分钟 然后翻面继续boil档，再10分钟 具体时间需要根据烤箱稍作调整 我只烤了7分钟，表面已经有点糊了 肉丸子入平底锅，加意大利酱，慢火煮20分钟以上 意大利酱：
我煮
05/23/2009 zz Pandemics: avoiding the mistakes of 1918EssayNature 459, 324-325 (21 May 2009) | doi:10.1038/459324a; Published online 20 May 2009 Pandemics: avoiding the mistakes of 1918John M. Barry1
Top of page
AbstractAs bodies piled up, the United States' response to the 'Spanish flu' was to tell the public that there was no cause for alarm. The authority figures who glossed over the truth lost their credibility, says John M. Barry. In the next influenza pandemic, be it now or in the future, be the virus mild or virulent, the single most important weapon against the disease will be a vaccine. The second most important will be communication. History has shown that to cut vaccine production time, minimize economic and social disruption, deliver health care and even food, governments need to communicate well — both between themselves and with the public. The US response to the 1918 flu offers a case study of a communication strategy to avoid. The world response to the threat of an emerging flu in recent weeks shows that we have learned from the past. And there is much to learn. The pandemic that began in January 1918 and ended in June 1920 killed an estimated 35 million–100 million people worldwide, or 1.9–5.5% of the entire population1. Although an estimated 2% of people died in Western countries, some large subgroups were affected disproportionately. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, based in New York, found that the disease killed 3.26% of its insured US industrial workers aged 25–45. Given that 25–40% of the population contracted the disease, case mortality would have been 8–13% in that population2.
The flu started slowly. In the United States, a small wave of the disease sputtered across the country in the spring of 1918, but went largely unnoticed except in military training camps. The effects were more noticeable in Europe, where many soldiers in the armies of the First World War fell ill. By the end of summer, a more lethal wave had surfaced in Switzerland. On 3 August, the US military received an intelligence report comparing the Swiss epidemic to the Black Death. 
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Bold declarations like this one from San Francisco were rare in 1918. The US government used the same strategy for communicating about the disease that it had developed to disseminate war news. The essence of that strategy was described by its main architect, writer Arthur Bullard: "Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms ... There is nothing in experience to tell us one is always preferable to the other ... The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if is true or false." Fellow adviser Walter Lippman, another architect of this strategy, sent President Woodrow Wilson a memo saying that most citizens were "mentally children" and advising that "self-determination" had to be subordinated to "order" and "prosperity". In 1917, the day after receiving Lippman's memo, Wilson issued an executive order to control all government communication strategy during the war that was premised on keeping up morale. 
BETTMANN/CORBIS As a result, when the full-blown and lethal pandemic wave arrived in the United States in September 1918, Wilson never made a single statement about it, and lesser public figures provided only reassurance. US surgeon general Rupert Blue declared: "There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are observed." Local health officials echoed this message. Chicago's director of public health, for instance, decided not to "interfere with the morale of the community", explaining: "It is our job to keep people from fear. Worry kills more than the disease." That last phrase became a mantra repeated in hundreds of newspapers. Paid advertising carried a comparable message: every day, press advertisements for Vicks VapoRub appeared with the line: "Simply the Old-Fashioned grip masquerading under A New Name." Yet it was not ordinary influenza by another name. The disease was unusual enough to be misdiagnosed initially as cholera, typhoid and dengue. Some people died within 24 hours of the first symptom. The most horrific feature was bleeding, not just from the nose and mouth but also from the ears and eyes. Nonetheless, the government and newspapers continued to reassure. Although physicians fully understood the explosive nature of the pandemic, they routinely misled people, covered up the truth and lied. In Philadelphia, for example, public-health director Wilmer Krusen promised — before a single civilian had died — to "confine this disease to its present limits. In this we are sure to be successful." As the death toll grew, he repeatedly reassured the public that "the disease has about reached its crest. The situation is well in hand." When the number of daily deaths broke 200, he again promised: "The peak of the epidemic has been reached." When 300 died in a day, he said: "These deaths mark the high-water mark." Ultimately, daily deaths reached 759. The press never questioned him. Meanwhile, the bodies piled up. In many cities, they lay uncollected in homes for days. In some places, including Philadelphia, they were buried in mass graves dug by steam shovels. Same old fever?Unfortunately, Philadelphia's communication strategy was the rule, not the exception. Local officials and newspapers across the country were either deceptive or said nothing. Many papers did not print lists of the dead. Even as 8,000 soldiers were hospitalized in Camp Pike, Arkansas, over four days, the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, just a few miles away, maintained, "Spanish influenza is plain la grippe — same old fever and chills." This communication strategy of either reassurance or silence had its effect. Its effect was terror. Lies and silence cost authority figures credibility and trust. With no public official to believe in, people believed rumours and their most horrific imaginings. A man living in Washington described the result: "People were afraid to kiss one another, people were afraid to eat with one another ... It destroyed those contacts and destroyed the intimacy that existed amongst people ... there was an aura of a constant fear that you lived through from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night." Under that pressure, society first drifted, then threatened to fall apart. The health-care system, already drained of physicians and nurses by the military, collapsed first. Elsewhere, fear, not illness, kept people at home. Absenteeism reached extraordinary levels. Shipyard workers were told that their duties were as important as a soldier's; they were paid only if they worked; and, unlike elsewhere, physicians were available to them on site. Yet absentee rates in the shipyards — one of the few industries for which there are good data — still ranged from 45% to 58% (ref. 3). Absenteeism crippled the railroad system, which transported nearly all freight, bringing it to the point of collapse. It shut down telephone exchanges, closing off communication, and further isolating and alienating people. Grocers refused to open. Coal sellers closed. In cities and rural communities, the Red Cross reported that people "were starving to death not for lack of food but because the well were too panic stricken to bring food to the sick". Victor Vaughan, a sober, serious scientist, for years dean of the medical school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, worried that if this trend accelerated "for a few more weeks ... civilization could easily disappear from the face of the Earth". Better communication led to better results. In San Francisco, for example, despite a slow reaction to the initial onslaught of flu, in October 1918 the mayor, health officials and business and union leaders all signed a full-page newspaper advert in huge type reading: "Wear A Mask and Save Your Life!" It was a rare, bold statement. In this city, society, although reeling, functioned. Food was delivered, and the sick were cared for. Where people had accurate information and knew what they faced, they often performed heroically. Red Cross professionals, physicians and nurses routinely risked their lives. When Philadelphia's city police — who knew the facts even if the papers weren't printing them — were asked to supply four volunteers to "remove bodies from beds ... and load them in vehicles", 118 officers responded4. Truth tellingOf course, the world is different today to how it was in 1918. But communication remains paramount. Until we develop a vaccine that is effective against all influenza viruses and available globally, the world will be vulnerable to influenza pandemics. H1N1 is the most immediate danger, including the possibility that a more deadly wave will strike later this year, but H5N1 and other viruses remain pandemic threats. First and foremost, authorities must tell each other the truth. This provides crucial lead time for vaccine production. Models even suggest that in a few circumstances, surveillance and transparency may allow a new virus to be contained and extirpated. The world has performed well in the past few weeks in this regard, but this is a lesson that has not been entirely taken on board. In 2003, China initially covered up SARS, putting the world at risk and contributing to near-panic in Beijing, where people felt they could trust nothing coming from the government. In 2004, Thailand and Indonesia withheld information during the first outbreaks of H5N1 bird flu. There continue to be both political and bureaucratic problems in ensuring that H5N1 isolates are shared — especially by Indonesia — thereby increasing the risk to the world. Telling the public the truth is also paramount. Before a vaccine becomes available during a severe pandemic, at some point the government will ask citizens to adhere to a series of public-health guidelines for non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as staying at home if they become ill. Large-scale, sustained compliance will be essential if those measures are to succeed. Compliance requires trust, and that depends on truth-telling. In the United States, former health and human services secretaries Tommy Thompson and Michael Leavitt deserve credit for institutionalizing real transparency in the current US pandemic plan. And the administration of President Barack Obama has performed admirably so far. Obama himself has addressed the issue several times, making perhaps only one mistake, when he said the threat was "cause for concern, but not alarm". Had things deteriorated quickly, he ran the risk of suddenly having to reverse his position. In Mexico, the problem was not reticence but candour, releasing inaccurate information that overstated the problem. Mexico should be congratulated for this, not condemned. Although a false alarm can be damaging, it is not nearly as damaging as silence — the type of silence that makes people believe the truth is being withheld. That is how trust disintegrates and how rumours — passed in the streets in 1918, today passed over Internet blogs — take hold and grow. I don't much care for the term 'risk communication'. It implies that the truth is being managed. The truth should not be managed, it should be told. Only by knowing the truth can imaginary horrors be transformed into concrete realities. And only then can people start to deal with those realities, and do so without panic. FURTHER READING Barry, J. M., Viboud, C. & Simonsen, L. Cross-protection between successive waves of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic: epidemiological evidence from US Army camps and from Britain. J. Infect. Dis. 198, 1427-1434 (2008). Barry, J. M. Comments on the nonpharmaceutical interventions in New York City and Chicago during the 1918 flu pandemic. J. Transl. Med. 5, 65 (2007). Canetti, E. Crowds and Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). Osterholm, M. T. Unprepared for a Pandemic. Foreign Affairs 86, 47-57 (2007). Vaughn, S. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (University of North Carolina Press, 1980). See Commentary, page 322, and for coverage of the H1N1 outbreak: http://www.nature.com/swineflu. Top of page
References
05/20/2009 zz Stimulus Funding Elicits a Tidal Wave of ‘Challenge Grants’
News of the WeekBiomedical Research:Stimulus Funding Elicits a Tidal Wave of ‘Challenge Grants’Jocelyn KaiserA frantic grant-writing effort that has consumed biomedical research scientists this spring came to an end last week, resulting in a huge pile of new applications—more than 10 times larger than expected—to be reviewed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After this enthusiastic response, there will be many disappointed applicants: The rejection rate could run as high as 98%. The flurry of activity was sparked by the recent economic stimulus bill, which enabled NIH to expand ongoing grants and offer so-called Challenge Grants, described as an opportunity to jump-start research on certain topics. The NIH director's off ice announced the competition for these 2-year grants, worth $1 million each, in early March. This was just 2 weeks after President Barack Obama signed the bill that gave NIH $8.2 billion to spend on extramural research by October 2010 (Science, 17 April, p. 318). By 12 May, NIH had logged about 20,000 applications for the Challenge awards. That total surpasses anyone's expectations and tops what NIH normally receives in its regular three-times-a-year grant cycle. By contrast, NIH received only 1600 applications from researchers seeking to expand existing grants—fewer than anticipated. Initially, NIH expected to receive perhaps 1500 Challenge Grant applications and make 200 or more awards, says Anthony Scarpa, director of the NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR). But as NIH officials spoke with university administrators, Scarpa says, NIH kept revising its estimate upward. Even after the 27 April deadline had passed, it took a while to pin down the total numbers. Some applications got clogged in the federal grants–submission portal, Grants.gov. Although researchers worried that the Web site would collapse, that did not happen—the system just took longer than usual to process applications, so NIH gave investigators an 11-day extension. The 20,000 total is surprising, says one NIH official, but NIH has seen a similar disproportionate spike in first-year applications for some other new programs, such as the Pioneer Awards. Although some scientists grumble that the Challenge Grant award success rate will be so low that decisions cannot be made rationally, others are buoyed by the outpouring of ideas: "This is our march on Washington. Now policymakers need to step up to the plate," says cancer researcher Peter Bitterman of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, which submitted about 240 applications. To review the applications, CSR has called on 15,000 people, largely previous reviewers but also new ones found with help from scientific societies. Each application will be sent electronically to three experts, then some 30 study sections will meet in person to assign overall scores, using a new "editorial board" model, Scarpa says. CSR staff members, who are also organizing a regular round of reviews this spring, have been working overtime, he adds: "It's a heroic effort. They're really overworked." But Scarpa says he is confident that "it will be an excellent level of review."
05/04/2009 zz China Falls Short on Olympic CleanupChina Falls Short on Olympic CleanupBy Jackie Grom Beijing sits in a soupy haze of pollution from nearby factories, coal-fired power plants, and traffic that increases dramatically by the day, making the city one of the most air polluted in the world. China spent billions of dollars trying to control emissions that could hinder athlete's performances on game day. From 20 July to 20 September 2008, the Chinese government temporarily closed factories and regulated the number of cars on the road in Beijing and in nearby areas, all with the hopes of curbing aerosols--fine particles suspended in the atmosphere. China tried a similar traffic strategy in 2006 during a 3-day political summit and achieved 40% to 60% reductions in aerosol concentrations, according to one study. But this study covered only a short period and concentrated on aerosols at ground level, not throughout the larger atmosphere. For the 2008 Olympics, Chinese officials called for reductions of 60% to 70% in automobile emissions and up to 30% in industrial emissions. To find out how successful they were, atmospheric scientist Jan Cermak of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and a colleague used satellite data to measure the overall amount of particulates hanging over Beijing from 1 August through 19 September for each year from 2002 through 2008. This technique allowed them to analyze aerosol concentrations in the atmosphere from top to bottom but didn't allow them to decipher exactly where they were in that space. But just monitoring aerosols isn't enough, because weather also affects air pollution's severity--a rainy day can flush pollutants from the air, whereas a windy day can bring in pollutants from far-off industrial areas or carry them out of the city. So the researchers also collected data on wind speed and direction, rainfall, and relative humidity. They then applied these relationships to predict what air pollution would have been in 2008 without any emission controls. It turns out that the Chinese only achieved a modest reduction in aerosols. The researchers report in a paper in press in Geophysical Research Letters that pollution-control efforts reduced the overall amount of aerosols in the atmosphere by about 10% to 15%. That small change highlights the importance of factors such as wind direction in determining local pollution, says Cermak. In spite of the reduction in local emissions, winds from the south and southeast sullied Beijing's air by bringing in pollution from distant industrial areas, he says. Tad Anderson, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, says that this paper shows that China's attempt to curb pollution was "based on a flawed understanding of the nature of atmospheric aerosols." He points out that aerosols can stay in the air for days and easily travel thousands of kilometers. "You take out the local sources in Beijing and you've still got the regional [sources], which are the dominant cause of pollution." Still, it's too early to dismiss China's pollution control efforts, says atmospheric scientist Qi Zhang of the State University of New York at Albany. She cautions that the satellite data can't tease out the effects of the emissions controls at ground level, where people breathe.
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