Science Foo Camp ended last Sunday;I took high resolution pictures of the session boards and mugshots of attendees, and put them on Flickr. it’s now Friday, but between the travelling, the catching up with work, and yet another presentation on geobrowsers (this time at the British Antarctic Survey proper), it’s taken until now to put this to blog. I’ll keep it short and intense, just like the camp.

The big lesson for me at Science Foo was just how much informatics has revolutionized science over the past decade. (Quite possibly, everybody knew this except me.) I ended up choosing sessions I am not well versed in — in other words, not so much virtual collaborative web 2.0 blah blah blah in favor of the physics of light, power laws and evolutionary development — and in each case, the science would have been far poorer were it not for Matlab’s modeling prowess.

If I have to have a favorite session, it would be the one entitled “Evolution of genes and gene expression + 3D maps of baby flies!” given by Jason Stajich and Angela DePace, both of UC Berkeley. They started exactly where my favorite book of the past few years — Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful — left off; a book, by the way, which I would love to get back from Felix if and when he finally finishes it.

The news from evo devo is this: Embryo development is explicable at the bit level, genetically, and so is evolution, through a precise understanding of how and when genes are expressed and how the smallest mutations in the regulatory bits of the genome controlling expression can lead to significant developmental changes. It amounts to a slam dunk for evolution, and the basics of it are just five chapters away for the interested layman, yet evo devo has still not budged the “standard model” of genetics that non-scientists continue to labor under.

The session on the physics of light was given by the entirely engaging Michael Berry, who also happened to be the first person I talked to as I arrived at Science Foo on Friday. I am very glad I didn’t google him perform a Google search on his person until just now, as I would have been entirely intimidated — Sir Michael Berry has an actual physical phenomenon named after him. As it was, I managed to follow the first half of his talk; for the rest, the pretty pictures in Michael’s presentation kept me in thrall.

Other notable sessions I attended:

Chris Anderson on whether the long tail obeys a power law or in fact a log-normal distribution (verdict in the room: It’s not at all clear we’re talking power laws pure and simple, and perhaps multiple contributory factors obey different probability distributions.)

Name drop of the weekend: “When I discussed this at Davos…”Some of the principals of the open-source Mozilla (Firefox) and Apache foundations discussing open source as a business model for, among other things, drug research.

Besides my own talk on geobrowsers, I played hookie for a couple of sessions — it’s not often I’m in Silicon Valley, so the chance to meet some of the minds behind Google Earth for dinner was an opportunity too good to pass up.

In sum: Every bit of SciFoo was incredible. The format works too.Guess who:
Let’s replicate this in Sweden this autumn. Thank you Nature, Google and O’Reilly Media for this intense experience.

How cool is this? TinyTuring by Kevin Shay of STAGGERnation is a plugin for Movable Type that’s inspired by — wait for it — the incredibly hacky (but deadly effective) stopgap antispam measure I threw together back in 2004 in a fit of pique at the injustice of it all.

The advantage of using TinyTuring: You no longer have to hack Movable Type’s code. The disadvantage: It’s not really a Turing Test. If the plugin takes off, then there are ways in which the dedicated spammer could generate scripts that circumvent TinyTuring’s defences.

The first weakness is that the answer is a single letter. That’s 26 possible answers. Faced with a brute-force automated script aimed at TinyTuring, one in 26 automated comments would still get through. That’s good, but thousands of automated comment spams per day divided by 26 is still not zero.

The second weakness is that the answer — the letter — has to be listed as part of the question. An enterprising spammer might reverse social-engineer typical sentences and notice that most people use the default MTTinyTuring tag, which allows a trivial parsing solution, or else he might look for one-letter words and try just those. In any case, a typical sentence uses significantly fewer than 26 unique letters, so the odds can be made better than one in 26 — just by trying all the unique letters used in the sentence. Another very clever strategy would be to compare successive iterations of the question, and latch on to the one element that changes randomly.

My own original Turing Test questions were indeed of the type “Type the letter F”, but I quickly switched over to questions where the answer does not appear in the text, because spammers did catch on. Now, I use questions such as “How many letters ‘o’ in the word ‘Google’? (Type a digit)” or “Who is the father of evolution? (Hint: Charles ___ . Just his last name, thanks)”. I have found these to be invincible to scripts (and stupid people). They aren’t possible with TinyTuring, because we don’t know beforehand what the (random) answer will be for which we have to ask a question.

My original hack’s repellent effect is the promise that every time a spammer invests time on my blog to manually answer a one-of-a-kind question that no machine can answer (with a view to hardcoding that answer into a script aimed at just my blog) I will change it. This works because I care about my blog more than the spammer does. Manual spamming just isn’t economical.

A suggestion for TinyTuring 2.0, then: Make a mini content management system for question/answer pairs which we individual bloggers write ourselves. If a spammer figures out the current question/answer pair, we just change it with a new one. A further refinement would be to rotate the question/answer pair automatically after a random number of accepted comments. That should really infuriate spammers, even on high-traffic sites.

But in any case, thanks for the thanks, Kevin. I should vanity surf more often:-)

Driving up and down Silicon valley (in my rented car), I cannot help but sense that the area is living a kind of utopian vision, with everything geared towards making life easy so you are free to create, innovate and mate to produce the next generation of rational people.

The Google campus is this vision writ small. Everything on it seems geared to making you want to stay late — beach volleyball fields, food, gym, off-beat architecture… all in the service of organizing the world’s information. The sense of mission is palpable among the Google employees I’ve met so far. It’s like a cult of rationality, and it’s a wonderful thing to behold.

That too is the feeling that I get from scifoo attendees after an evening of preliminary sessions and a series of intense random conversations about genetics, evo devo, the informatics of chemistry, collaborative mapping, open source drug development… My previous life as a journalist is doing overtime — I get to ask questions that get people talking without really giving away my own ignorance on the topic. My inability/refusal to specialize in anything in favor of embracing the general is paying off here, sort of.

Just a couple of quick vignettes — at the outside buffet dinner, some guy chatting in the next group over, with a five o’clock shadow and sneakers jeans and t-shirt, looked familiar — probably because he was Larry Page, hanging out with such a lack of affectation that it was hard not to stare.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow is here too, and I can’t believe I actually went up to him and said his blog was an inspiration to me. It’s true, of course, but it was rather unlike me to admit it.

It’s a full day of sessions ahead. A giant calendar hangs in the lobby where anyone can book a room for an hour and propose a topic for a talk or discussion. Geospatial visualization is featured on a number of them, but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t attend those topics where I know less about, rather than more. Then, this afternoon, I’ll be meeting the Google Earth team — apparently, they like my other blog🙂

“The captain has turned off the seatbelt sign. You may now use electronic devic… Oh I guess you don’t have any electronic devices.”

I had intended to travel light from London to San Francisco for Science Foo Camp. Just hand luggage. Instead, I would have to check in everything, down to my copy of the Herald Tribune and New Scientist. The prospect of a transatlantic flight without literature was daunting. It appeared, for a while, that the terrorists would succeed in boring me to death.

At the last minute, at the gate, I did manage to buy a copy of Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, which they let me take on board (though they practically disassembled my shoes before boarding). Despite the novel being about four people trying to commit suicide but not quite managing for the duration of the bookI’m sorry, did I give away the plot?, I finished it half-way through the flight. After that, it was slim pickings — a complimentary Daily Mail, and NorthWest Airlines’ inflight magazine. It could have been worse. My neighbor was reading Paolo Coelho. She was rapturous about The Da Vinci Code. (I asked.)

As luck would have it, buying the cheapest ticket to San Francisco involved a flight out of Gatwick, which meant I was one of the few flights to make it from the UK to the US. Yes, it was delayed by five hours, yes I missed my connecting flight in Minneapolis (whence I now blog) but yes I will make it to San Francisco tomorrow, as long as I don’t try to bring lipstick on board. My baby milk will be fine, though, if I drink some in front of the security agent so as to prove it is not an explosive gel. (I suspect that next time “they” will use edible explosives — or, seriously now, condoms with explosive gel that they swallow beforehand and then retrieve from their stool when they go to the toilet on the plane.)

About that New Scientist: It brought fantastic newsAlas, it’s pay per read.: Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) looks increasingly to be onto something when it comes to defining subatomic particles as tangles in a node-like lattice (=space). I feel like an early groupie to a band that’s gone big time. No time now to dig deeper, but for my reference’s sake, here are the papers the New Scientist article references:
 
A topological model of composite preons

Quantum gravity and the standard model

Graviton propagator in loop quantum gravity

I hope to blog Science Foo Camp, and take pictures too, though there are rules. I also suspect that a few hours into the proceedings, it will dawn on everyone that I actually don’t know anything, that I was invited as a result of mistaken assumptions, and that I will be shown to the Googleplex lobby by kind but insistent burly gentlemen.