NEW TECKNOLOGY

How to measure a website's IQ?

The creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has made an odd request: for a kind of rating system to help people distinguish sites that can be trusted to tell the truth, and those that can't.

Berners-Lee was speaking at the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation, which aims to ensure that everyone in the world benefits as the web evolves.

In his speech he referred to the way fears that the LHC could destroy the world spread like wildfire online. As the BBC puts it, he explained that "there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources."

He went on to say that he didn't think "a simple number like an IQ rating" is a good idea: "I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways". Whatever process is used to hand out the labels, it sounds like a bad idea to me.

Berners-Lee himself directed us towards some of the its biggest problems:

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable...A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging."

There are plenty of arguments online already about whether Scientology is a cult. I find it unlikely anyone will be keen to step in and label sites on either side as not to be trusted. Others might reasonably argue that all religions - whether established or not - should come with a warning message.

As for wading in to put a stop to conspiracy theories, I can't image anything their proponents could benefit from more.

Berners-Lee also mentioned the system would help people find out the real science behind, for example, the LHC's risks. You might think handing out rating for sites about science would be easier, with publishers of peer-reviewed science, for example, receiving a top rating without problems.

But there will be papers in the archives of any journal that have been entirely superseded. And a whole lot more that present results that are valid, but can be misleading to some readers. Web licences to ensure that people only read sites they can handle are the next logical step.

Fortunately it's much more likely that the whole idea will quietly be forgotten, which will at least prevent Berners-Lee receiving one of the first "potentially misleading" badges for thinking it up in the first place.

Let's hope the World Wide Web Foundation and its laudable goals have a rosier future.

Jamming the future

Nokia's cellphone anthropologist Jan Chipchase - interviewed in depth here - blogged this week about the etiquette of connectivity. When is it OK to whip out a phone or laptop, and when is it not?

Chipchase gives the example of a UK cafe that discouraged customers from using laptops by targeting them with bustling cleaners. I've certainly been to places that seem to carefully cultivate an atmosphere that makes people feel they must leave their laptops in their bags, and steal outside to make or receive calls.

Here in London, lovers of non-connectivity were worried this week by suggestions that underground trains may soon get cellphone reception. Trains between cities here commonly have "quiet carriages" where the use of phones and music players is banned. But I think that is unlikely on the Tube - the march of connectivity is set to continue until we just don't question it anymore.

Laptops are largely tolerated in lecture halls and mobile phones are hardly ever banned anywhere anymore. We've rolled over, and adjusted.

Chipchase hints at the idea of places that actually jam mobile or Wi-Fi reception. Also unlikely, I think, but before patches without connectivity are completely eradicated, perhaps they'll become more celebrated for a while. They deserve some commemoration of their passing.

Apple's latest DRM will restrict your wardrobe

You've heard, of course, of digital rights management - used to control how you play, copy or otherwise use media files like music.

Now Apple wants to apply that concept to your sporting wardrobe. In US patent application 2008/0218310, the company details a way to stop us using unauthorised training shoes with the in-sole sensors it sells as part of the Nike + iPod kit. The shoe sensors work as pedometers, sending the data to your iPod as you run.

Apple's patent explains that "some people have taken it upon themselves to remove the sensor from the special pocket of the Nike shoe and place it in inappropriate locations - shoelaces, for example - or place it on non-Nike shoes".

They seem to consider this beyond the pale. The patent details a way of "pairing a sensor and an authorised garment", such as "running shoes, shirts or slacks". Companies like Nike could authorise their garments by burying an RFID chip inside it. That chip is required to activate the sensor. No longer will you be able to use the sensor you paid for with any shoe of your choosing.

Apple's idea sounds mean-minded to me. What do you think?

The company has previous form, though. Last year they tried to patent a system that would prevent you from recharging a music player if you ever use it with unauthorised software.

Can the US make coal the new oil?

Last week, DARPA issued researchers with a plea for help: help us make liquid coal economical and environmentally sound.

It's easy to see the logic here - the US Department of Defense guzzles its way through 300,000 barrels of liquid fuel a day, relying on foreign oil to meet that need. The US has an estimated 275 billion tons of coal reserves. Convert that coal to liquid fuel and - hey presto - you could sever the dependency on foreign oil .

The technology even exists - the Nazis were producing liquid coal using indirect synthesis via the Fischer-Tropsch process in the 1940s. But that in itself is revealing - this isn't a very economical process, and was perhaps only viable in Nazi Germany as a last resort when oil resources dried up.

A Google search for 'liquid coal' offers little comfort. Coming in at number 3 is "Liquid Coal is a Bad Deal for Global Warming", while at number 6 is "Why Liquid Coal Is Not a Viable Option to Move America Beyond Oil".

The US Air Force itself would tend to agree: on 5 August they appear to be on the verge of abandoning their own attempts at converting liquid to coal. Time will tell if DARPA succeeds where the US Air Force has failed.

Bletchley Park gets US cash injection

There's always been a bit of confusion between the UK and the US over who contributed most to the invention of the electronic programmable computer. It is heart-warming, however, to see some leading lights in US computing recognise the achievements of Alan Turing and his fellow WWII code breakers that were long kept classified.

Data encryption company PGP Corporation and PC-inventor IBM donated $100,000 to help maintain Bletchley Park, where Turing and colleagues worked. To what should be the UK government's shame, the place risks falling into ruin. I visited today as PGP and IBM tried to encourage others to add to their donation. If you want to do so, visit this website.

Bletchley Park says it needs some £10 million for the upkeep of the crumbling huts - where Alan Turing and others kickstarted computing as they tried to crack Nazi codes - and the manor house nearby. A further £7 million is needed for a museum to house Europe's largest collection of fully functional computers.

The most famous computers from Bletchley Park are Colossus, the world?s first programmable electronic computer, which was used to decode Nazi teleprinter traffic on the fly, while the Bombes - giant electromechanical calculators - revealed the rotor settings from various types of Enigma machines.

But because this top secret work stayed classified for so long after the war, a US computer, EDVAC stole some of Bletchley Park's deserved thunder, PGP's chief technical officer Jon Callas and president Phil Dunkelberger told me. Only in the late 70s did the achievements of the British machines begin to be recognised, by which time the early history of computing was already written.

It wasn't until the 1970s and early 1980s that computer scientists began to hear whispers of the existence of a super fast machine in England that predated post-war American computers," says Callas. "When the details eventually came out about Colossus we couldn?t quite believe how fast it had been at its one task: breaking ciphers.?

"As the acknowledged birthplace of modern computing, Bletchley Park is responsible for laying the foundation for many of today's technology innovations," said Dunkelberger.

"We have had a great response to the campaign so far, but more is definitely needed to preserve this British ? and international ? icon," says Bletchley spokesman Jon Fell. He told me that he hopes the UK National Lottery and the US Sidney E Frank Foundation will soon pledge money too.

DNA

The story begins in 1990, when the Human Genome Project was launched to decipher the complete instruction manual of the human being. This epic endeavour took over a decade to complete and cost billions of dollars. Eight years after its launch, a rival private bid was announced in an attempt to shut the public project down. A personal feud erupted between Craig Venter, who ran Celera's privately funded Genome Project, and Sir John Sulston, who oversaw Britain's share of the public Human Genome Project. Craig Venter believed he could finish the Human Genome several years before the public project.

The fighting became so intense that President Clinton stepped in to try to unite the two sides. Clinton asked a go-between to sort out the two warring groups. Over pizza and beer in a basement, the two sides agreed to a cease-fire. They would announce their draft results -- together -- in a joint celebration hosted by The White House in June 2000.

DNA - Deoxyribonucleic Acid

The deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule is the genetic blueprint for each cell and ultimately the blueprint that determines every characteristic of a living organism.

The DNA molecule was discovered in 1951 by Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins using X-ray diffraction. In 1953 Crick described the structure of the DNA molecule as a double helix, somewhat like a sprial staircase with many individual steps. In 1962 Crick, Watson, and Wilkins received the Nobel prize for their pioneering work on the structure of the DNA molecule.

Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), is genetic material of all cellular organisms and most viruses. DNA carries the information needed to direct protein synthesis and replication. Protein synthesis is the production of the proteins needed by the cell or virus for its activities and development. Replication is the process by which DNA copies itself for each descendant cell or virus, passing on the information needed for protein synthesis. In most cellular organisms, DNA is organized on chromosomes located in the nucleus of the cell.

Structure

A molecule of DNA consists of two chains, strands composed of a large number of chemical compounds, called nucleotides, linked together to form a chain. These chains are arranged like a ladder that has been twisted into the shape of a winding staircase, called a double helix. Each nucleotide consists of three units: a sugar molecule called deoxyribose, a phosphate group, and one of four different nitrogen-containing compounds called bases. The four bases are adenine (abbreviated A), guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytosine (C). The deoxyribose molecule occupies the center position in the nucleotide, flanked by a phosphate group on one side and a base on the other. The phosphate group of each nucleotide is also linked to the deoxyribose of the adjacent nucleotide in the chain. These linked deoxyribose-phosphate subunits form the parallel side rails of the ladder. The bases face inward toward each other, forming the rungs of the ladder.

The nucleotides in one DNA strand have a specific association with the corresponding nucleotides in the other DNA strand. Because of the chemical affinity of the bases, nucleotides containing adenine are always paired with nucleotides containing thymine, and nucleotides containing cytosine are always paired with nucleotides containing guanine. The complementary bases are joined to each other by weak chemical bonds called hydrogen bonds.

In 1953 American biochemist James Watson and British biophysicist Francis Crick published the first description of the structure of DNA. Their model proved to be so important for the understanding of protein synthesis, DNA replication, and mutation that they were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work.

Protein Synthesis

DNA carries the instructions for the production of proteins. A protein is composed of smaller molecules called amino acids, and the structure and function of the protein is determined by the sequence of its amino acids. The sequence of amino acids, in turn, is determined by the sequence of nucleotide bases in the DNA. A sequence of three nucleotide bases, called a triplet, is the genetic code word, or codon, that specifies a particular amino acid. For instance, the triplet GAC (guanine, adenine, and cytosine) is the codon for the amino acid leucine, and the triplet CAG (cytosine, adenine, and guanine) is the codon for the amino acid valine. A protein consisting of 100 amino acids is thus encoded by a DNA segment consisting of 300 nucleotides. Of the two polynucleotide chains that form a DNA molecule, only one strand, called the sense strand, contains the information needed for the production of a given amino acid sequence. The other strand aids in replication.

Protein synthesis begins with the separation of a DNA molecule into two strands. In a process called transcription, a section of the sense strand acts as a template, or pattern, to produce a new strand called messenger RNA (RNA). The RNA leaves the cell nucleus and attaches to the ribosomes, specialized cellular structures that are the sites of protein synthesis. Amino acids are carried to the ribosomes by another type of RNA, called transfer (RNA). In a process called translation, the amino acids are linked together in a particular sequence, dictated by the RNA, to form a protein.

A gene is a sequence of DNA nucleotides that specify the order of amino acids in a protein via an intermediary mRNA molecule. Substituting one DNA nucleotide with another containing a different base causes all descendant cells or viruses to have the altered nucleotide base sequence. As a result of the substitution, the sequence of amino acids in the resulting protein may also be changed. Such a change in a DNA molecule is called a mutation. Most mutations are the result of errors in the replication process. Exposure of a cell or virus to radiation or to certain chemicals increases the likelihood of mutations.

Replication

In most cellular organisms, replication of a DNA molecule takes places in the cell nucleus and occurs just before the cell divides. Replication begins with the separation of the two-polynucleotide chains, each of which then acts as a template for the assembly of a new complementary chain. As the old chains separate, each nucleotide in the two chains attracts a complementary nucleotide that has been formed earlier by the cell. The nucleotides are joined to one another by hydrogen bonds to form the rungs of a new DNA molecule. As the complementary nucleotides are fitted into place, an enzyme called DNA polymerase links them together by bonding the phosphate group of one nucleotide to the sugar molecule of the adjacent nucleotide, forming the side rail of the new DNA molecule. This process continues until a new polynucleotide chain has been formed alongside the old one, forming a new double-helix molecule.

Research and Applications

The study of DNA is still under way, and the results of such research are being applied in many disciplines. The Human Genome Project in the United States is a federally funded effort to determine the sequence of bases of the three billion pairs of nucleotides composing the human genetic material. The project will make possible the analysis of the mutations that cause genetic diseases and so will provide information needed to develop medicines and procedures for treating these diseases.

Forensic science uses techniques developed in DNA research to identify individuals and identify suspects who have committed crimes. DNA from semen, skin, or blood taken from a crime scene can be compared with the DNA of a victim or suspect, and the results can be used in court as evidence.