Krishwords

Wired has an article in which they report about Bill Gates’ comments on Opensource.

One thing Gates won’t be leaving behind in retirement is his distaste for open source software. After one scientist asked if Gates would consider open source uses in health research, the man who built his $280 billion company on the power of intellectual property bristled.

"There’s free software and then there’s open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we’re aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: "I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them," he said, adding with a shrug: "That may seem radical."

The funny part about the whole episode, aside from his ignorance on the matter, is that he is saying to scientists that their approach in academia, which was responsible for propelling the world to the current advanced state, is nonsense. It is time for him to realize that opensource itself was inspired by the scientists in academia. Bill Gates joins Jaron Lanier in his ignorance about science.

The so called virtual reality Guru, Jaron Lanier, long known for his criticism of “Wisdom of Crowds” attitude of Open Source development model and the Internet Collectivism (so called Web 2.0), recently wrote an article called Long Live Closed Source Software. I call his article as “Ignorance of an Individual”. In his article, he argues against open source process and calls upon the scientific community to not fall into the trap of the open source development model. I don’t know much about this dude but he comes out as someone who thinks that he can talk about science just because he attended a scifoo camp (a meeting where most of the participants are from the fringes of science. They do invite some hardcore scientists but mostly can be classified as a fringe group of geeks and people with experience in science. Well, such a meeting is important because it helps drive discussion about the interface between science and technology. But, my argument is that attending a scifoo meeting alone doesn’t make an individual a scientist). He uses Martha Stewart and Science in the same sentence and I am sure it talks about how much science he knows. If he had ever been in the hardcore academia, he would have understood that science is not trying to take the open source approach and, in fact, open source approach is an outgrowth of how science is done in the academia. Richard Stallman didn’t jump out one day and talk about free software. It was his experience in an academic environment that raised his awareness about the importance of sharing software code. If Mr. Lanier shows iPhone as an example of innovation, I can list Rockets, Theory of Evolution, Splitting of Atoms, Quarks, Nuclear Energy, and every other scientific innovation as an example of open source innovation because the academia’s approach to science is the predecessor to open source approach. In front of all the innovation listed above, Iphone comes as a kid’s toy made in a third world country. This is the kinda problem we face when engineers, marketers and business community start poking their nose into science. They just talk rubbish. I am not saying that these people should be kept away from science. They are very important for the commoditization of scientific innovation. They are the ones who takes the fruits of science to the ordinary citizens. My argument is that they should realize the scope of their role and not poke their nose into hardcore science. Science knows how to progress and thatz why the world is where it is today. I don’t expect people to understand the scientific process but I expect people to keep the “ignorance of individuals” away from science. Just because someone got to hobnob with Martha Stewart in a scifoo meeting doesn’t give the person right to talk nonsense about how science should be done. Lemme quote a paragraph from his article which clearly shows his ignorance about how science is done in the universities.

Academic efforts are usually well encapsulated, for instance. Scientists don’t publish until they are ready, but publish they must. So science as it is already practiced is open, but in a punctuated way, not a continuous way. The interval of nonopenness—the time before publication—functions like the walls of a cell. It allows a complicated stream of elements to be defined well enough to be explored, tested, and then improved.

Lemme explain here about what happens inside the walls of science laboratories. As a person who has spend 8 years doing physics in academia and someone who is still involved in academia due to some personal reasons, I can talk with clarity. There is some amount of secrecy today among certain groups in the scientific community but it is a recent phenomena. Partly, it is due to the competition for patents started off by companies in areas like chemistry and biology. This has spilled over to other branches of sciences too. If you start looking at the golden period of physics when people like Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, etc. were hobnobbing with each other to even the later periods of Feynman, Murray Gellman, etc., you will understand that science was done in a perfectly open source approach. Unlike what Mr. Lanier portrays, science was not done in bursts of secrecy. He calls the period between start of a research project to the publication of the results/findings in a scientific journal as a period of secrecy. I am pretty convinced that he has never participated in a scientific research project. Anyone with a background in science know about the level of communication that happens between scientists from around the world using letters (now email), telephone calls, discussions during conferences, even visits to other universities/institutes for discussion, etc.. All these communications takes place without the need for any kind of NDAs. If the approach of scientists during the so called period of silence was anywhere close to what Apple, Microsoft or Google do, they wouldn’t have conversed with fellow scientists in their field (including their competitors). Even in the 1990s, when I was doing science, I have done the same thing. This approach continues even today in most of the scientific community. Such actions by scientists is what we, in the software field, call as open source approach. In fact, this kinda sharing takes place even during the current day ultra competitive environment with companies in the scientific mix. Another point which he is quoting but failing to understand about the scientific process is that all the scientists in academia publish their research in scientific journals. Anyone, in any part of the world, can build on the published work, make modifications to the published experimental methods, extend the models, etc. This is open source approach.

I strongly suggest that Mr. Lanier should go around marketing Iphone and leave science to people who are capable of doing it. Science is better off without such nonsense. Open Source has done remarkably well by shifting the whole marketplace towards another era. Ignorance of an individual cannot demolish the wisdom of the crowds. Period.

The blogosphere got a bit excited today with an article on New York Times about the plans of Google and Microsoft to offer an online personalized health care records for consumers. This excitement was further enhanced by a post by Philipp Lenssen with screenshots of a prototype of Google Health service.

Right now, our health care records are at the mercy of doctors and insurance providers. US federal law allows us to request our health care records. However, these records are only available in a paper format. Even with the doctors and insurance providers, it is kept either in a paper format or in a proprietary software format. There is no option for patients to have their health records in the digital formats. After some egging by the Bush administration, some of the providers have moved the health records online. For example, my health care provider is offering my health records online. But it is not the case for everyone. Even among those providers who offer health records online, we are at the mercy of insurance companies or health care providers. There is no independent centralized personal health record “repository”, with the user (patient) having a complete control of who has access to what information about their health. This is the area which is interesting to both Google and Microsoft. Both the companies are working on a system to provide this opportunity for users. Please read the New York Times article for more information on this. I would also like to point out to Adam Bosworth’s detailed post on this topic. Fellow TechBiz Media blogger, Deepak Singh, has written quite a lot on this topic. Unlike Deepak, my interest in this area is more on the peripheral level. I will discuss about certain issues that are of interest to me and offer my opinions related to the privacy issues associated with an online Personal Health Record (PHR) system.

The first and foremost concern for me is that the health care records should be stored in a system that adopts open standards. Efforts are underway to develop open standards based methods to extract RDF data from xml documents. It is very important to develop Microformats to manage healthcare information. A company that uses open standards to store health data on their online system will gain the confidence of the users. This will ensure that user’s vital health care information is not locked down under a proprietary system and it is accessible without a need for a particular vendor providing applications.

The second and equally important concern is about the search engine offered by such vendors. It is very vital that a vertical search engine that could provide accurate information is made available. It is no easy task and companies like Google, Microsoft and many startups are working on this area. Since we cannot take chances with our health, the accuracy of the search engines becomes important. I expect Google to have an advantage in this area, even though Microsoft seems to have made some important acquisitions in this regard.

The final concern is about privacy. Many people have written about it. In fact, the fight over privacy could be the reason for the delay in the implementation of online PHRs. Some people are worried about putting all our health related information under a single company. I am not too worried about it. I would be comfortable with Google having my records than my insurance company or a health care provider or a startup as long as Google offers me a complete protection of my privacy. I am not all too worried about govt.’s ability to scrutinize my health records either. Anyway they will get my health records even if it is stored in a paper format. In fact, a big chunk of Americans don’t mind govt. looking into their health records including their genetic information (via link). As long as I have confidence that the company that offers online PHR will not mine my health data and not allow anyone else to look at it, I am fine with the privacy implications. It is up to Google or Microsoft or any other company, clamoring to hold my PHR data, to convince me on the privacy issues. It is a big mental shift for most of the people. Since I have understood about privacy in this Web 2.0 era and  I am comfortable with the new age ideas about privacy, I am not all too worried about it when it comes to online PHRs. As long as I have a system where I can control who views what from my health care records, I am ready to use such a system.

It is time we make a paradigm shift about how we manage our health care records. It is time we learn more about our health and take into our hands the power to make intelligent and informed decisions about our health. To do this, an open standards based vendor neutral PHR with a good search engine and a good privacy policy is needed. Once we bring in this paradigm shift, we can then start wondering about how we can use the “artificial intelligence” of the semantic web to help us manage our health care better.

I would like to hear about what you think about online PHR systems and your concerns about it.

Deepak has a very good post on Google’s plans for scientific data. It is heartening to know that Google is working towards a future of open scientific data. Check out the post for more information.

According to EcoGeek, Georgia becomes the first state in US to allow a cellulosic ethanol plant in USA

The state of Georgia just granted Range Fuels a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America.

Why is it important?

Cellulosic ethanol is ethanol that comes from cellulose instead of sugar. This is good because most plants don’t have a lot of sugar, but all plants have lots of cellulose. So, instead of using food crops, (like corn and sugar cane which have lots of sugar) to create fuel, we can use any crops, like mown grass clippings, fallen tree limbs or corn stalks (instead of corn ears) to create ethanol.

Is it efficient?

Cellulosic ethanol can contain up to 16 times more energy than is required to create it! If that doesn’t sound ridiculously impressive, consider that gasoline contains only 5 times more energy than was required to create it and corn ethanol is totally lame, containing only 1.3 times the energy required to create it.

So whatz the problem?

Well, it is expensive to create cellulosic ethanol at this point of time. With further advance in research, scientists and entrepreneurs are hoping to bring down the production costs comparable to gasoline. Read the post for more info.

When I hear statements like what Dana Blankenhorn has written here, it makes me giggle.

Science in our time is not open source by default. All research that’s shared is copyrighted, and it’s pursued by Universities with an aim of winning patents and royalties. It is, in sum, proprietary.

Science from the days of Newton has the open format. In fact, it is only correct to claim that open source has adopted scientific model. It is only in US, we see universities running around to patent stuff. Even then, a big percentage of scientists stick the the age old scientific model of knowledge sharing. I find it funny that Dana could even think along the lines above. Probably, it could be due to his education in a purely capitalistic environment. For a person like me, who got educated in both capitalistic and socialistic (erstwhile India) environment, I never considered science in the way Dana perceives it. I suppose my kinda sentiment is pervasive in Asia and Europe. Whatever it is, Dana’s characterization of science is wrong.

Press Esc carries this news article on a radically new theory on the Ice Age by Astrophysicist Robert Ehrlich.

Ice ages are not caused by planet Earth’s orbital variations as once thought, but by the dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years which is exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth, according to a radical new theory proposed by renowned astrophysicist Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University.

See the related paper here.

Link via Slashdot

If you have an interest in Astronomy, here is a free e-book on naked eye astronomy. Have fun.

I am an advocate of anything open (open source, open media, open standards, open access, etc). I was happy when the scientific journal Nature announced that it will use an open peer review model. But Wall Street Journal reports that Nature has given up on this approach. The reason? Lack of participation. it is sad that scientific community is not supportive of such an “open effort”.

But Nature, which is published by a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., said in an editorial in Thursday’s issue that it was ending the experiment due to lack of participation. The journal found that in the competitive world of scientific publishing, the vast majority of authors were unwilling to post their papers and few scientists were willing to criticize their peers’ work publicly by posting comments on Nature’s Web site.