Today will go down in history for this bit of news: cancer vaccine advances to clinical Stage 1 trials. It may not be this one that works for everyone, and it may not be a vaccine that will be used long into the future, but it’s a major step. As pointed out by cperciva on Hacker News, Stage 1 is basically testing to see if it doesn’t kill people, but it is still a major step.

Of course it’s a major step in fighting cancer, a disease that kills over 20,000 people every day. Even more importantly in the long term it is major step in human longevity, and the holy grail of biological immortality*. The control over telomerase and cell division are the key problems in tackling aging – key problems in even conceptualizing aging as a ‘clinical condition’ instead of just ‘inevitable biological destiny’.

With each opportunity the challenges, too, multiply. If we keep people alive for longer in the developed world, what does that mean to the already fragile social and economic welfare systems? There are already strong economic and social arguments for us having to abandon the model of work, pay, taxation and pensions we have inherited from the industrial age. How much stronger will the pressure be if biological arguments are added to this?

If major leaps in human longevity are made before equality (even ballpark) in global income levels is reached, what does that mean to social justice? Will we see a world where people in developed nations are looking at a prospect of immortality, while the life expectation in developing nations, even after major improvements, is still measured in decades? Inequality measured in economic terms is serious, but inequality measured in terms of immortality seems much more dramatic.

I don’t have the answers, though I’m definitely juggling these ideas. What are your thoughts?

* Note about immortality, since it easily seems far-fetched. Improvements in longevity are cumulative – that is, if we are able to extend someone’s lifespan by 50 years now, and during those 50 year a new treatment arrives which extends it again by 100 years, and within those 100, a new one extends by 1,000… you get the point. Therefore the small steps we may take now can already be the first steps on a path to biological immortality. And biological immortality simply means ‘not dying of natural causes’ – there is no convincing argument at the moment that we can avoid death from accidental massive trauma to the brain, for example.

Related articles

• Phase I clinical trials for dendritic cell vaccine designed to both eradicate cancer cells and prevent disease relapse (nextbigfuture.com)
• Sailing the seas of immortality and discovering the lands of longevity (silverevolution.wordpress.com)
• Longevity will be the new inequality (wall-notes.com)
• Transhumanism, Immortality, and Prolonging Human Lives (rogerdhansen.wordpress.com)
• Is the Soul of Man Immortal? (5ptsalt.com)

On a British train, a large red sticker on the door of the First Class carriage reads: “WELCOME TO FIRST CLASS. Passengers in this compartment without a First Class ticket could be prosecuted or issued a penalty fare.” In this brief bright sticker the non-complying passenger is given a warning and threatened with “prosecution” and a “penalty fare”. Implicitly but quite directly, the passenger is also threatened with force, which is only one step removed from the threats listed on the sticker: if a passenger refuses to pay a penalty fare, they may be removed by force to answer for their actions. If they are prosecuted, they may even be removed from their own home later to face any legal proceedings, or after them, for the punitive results.

Like this, we are threatened by violence, systematically and constantly, by the very structure of the society we form and live in. Violence is “behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage or kill someone” (OAD). If an individual does not comply with the rules forming the structure of society, they may face action by force against their own will, and thus action which hurts them.

Naturally, laws are based on a foundation of force. Far removed from everyday actions are threats of physical damage, incarceration and even death, but as we might all agree, they are exceptional. After all, if you do nothing wrong, you should have nothing to fear? Yet the fact remains that the threat of violence lurks in the background: an unfortunate misunderstanding, a morally relative transgression or an act that is universally agreed to be wrong can all lead to an outcome of force acted upon the individual against their will. Violence, deserved or not. (more…)

Today, a new news site launched in Finland. Called Topiikki (www.topiikki.fi), the service is a bit like Huffington Post and The Daily Beast (both excellent, innovative services) in its news curation. Topiikki sources the best-written and most insightful news items about the most important daily news and links to them. Topiikki for example gathers the ten most important news items each day and features them on Twitter and on the site as the daily “10X” collection. The site also features own content and debates. I am both an advisor and a columnist on the site.

Content curation is not a new phenomenon, but we are seeing more and more implementations of the idea. I think it the move from aggregation to intelligent curation – partly by humans, partly by smarter technology – that is at the heart of the move from a 2.0 to the x.0 web. I see it in different forms and platforms: from news curation to hyperlocal sourcing to hyperniche services. It may not be a disruptive revolution, but it is certainly rapid and fundamental change in operating logic and principles online. (more…)

A book called “Wake Up, You’re A Liberal” that I browsed once at the airport years ago had a line: “If we would all be conservatives, we would still be living in caves.” I think that’s funny, and true. Conservatism is by definition a traditional view of the world, which contains a mechanism that ensures its own survival. Liberalism needs to reinvent itself again every generation. There are no great liberal traditions, because liberalism is a stance that includes it own demise. Critical social science is a leftist philosophy of science, which claims that science must be critical of existing power structures. If the views promoted by critical social sciences were to become mainstream and structurally entrenched, the critics should turn their criticism to their own theories. Liberalism is not immune to this feedback loop.

So why does conservatism survive? Upholding traditions, ways of acting and modes of thought ensures that past gets transmitted into the future faithfully. This is high-fidelity heredity. Compare this to biological evolution. Genetic material is inherited accurately and exactly: it is a method of heredity which is high in fidelity. Conversely, cultural evolution has methods of heredity that include low-fidelity methods of transmission. Inherited material can mutate greatly as it is passed on. (more…)

Terry Pratchett’s lecture at the Royal College of Physicians in London was shown on BBC One last night, and is still available here (though you may have to be in the UK to view). Sir Terry’s talk – which he couldn’t deliver himself for the most part due to his early-onset Alzheimer’s – was mainly about attitudes to death, assisted death, and our choice of a dignified death that this far has been almost categorically denied.

I too find the thought that assisted death should be viewed as a questionable practice entirely alien, inhumane and medieval. But beyond that discussion, it was Sir Terry’s treatment of his own humanistic worldview that really moved me: “We are rising apes, not fallen angels,” which to me is a beautiful way to describe the difference between the nature of humanist morality and that of a a theistic morality.


 

Some links on shopping:
British consumers spent a total of £33 million online during the Monday lunch hour and £1.4 million was spent at 13:43 alone, making it the busiest online shopping minute ever. http://tinyurl.com/yckcbvb

More than two thirds of UK shoppers (70%) plan to spend an average of £220 of their Christmas shopping budget online. http://tinyurl.com/yc7959n

Deloitte estimates that spending on gifts this year in Britain alone will top £16.9 billion ($33 billion), while the average European household will rack up $872 in Christmas-related expenditures. BusinessWeek 2006.

Only buy what you need. Oh, that’s just not interesting to anyone, it seems..

First of all: apologies to Pingstate.nu. They’re a wonderful community and I actually wish them all the best.

The ridiculousness of Twitter continues to amaze me. It is a reasonable news filter for personal areas of interest, I’ll give it that much. But there must be better ways to filter news based on identity. See, Twitter has no respect for identity.

Here’s an example. Pingstate.nu is a large, thriving community of creative professionals and students in Finland. They have 6,500 active daily users (registered users, I gather). Just now, I created a Twitter account under their name and used their RSS feeds to populate the profile. I grabbed their logo and placed it as the image (that hurt a bit already). There’s nothing in the profile that doesn’t look authentic enough (except that there’s a disclaimer in the profile description). I did a rudimentary search for Finnish creative types and added some on the follow list – nothing too much (and nothing personal, in case you read this at some point). This took me about 4 minutes in all, and you could easily keep this going, increase the follower base with someone else’s quality content, and then start using it for spam/advertising/PR (pick one according to semantical preference). Here is twitter.com/pingstate. It keeps getting fresh content with the feeds, so I could now just leave it there to slowly gather followers.

Now, I wish Pingstate no ill (I’ve contacted them to let them know I’ve done this, and will happily turn the account over or delete if they wish me to). I did this to test just how far you can get with Twitter identity fraud, and I had to stop since it got too uncomfortable to carry on any further. Besides, I don’t want the wrath of thousands of people more capable in Photoshop upon me.

I took Pingstate as an example because they happened to have a feed I was following, and I didn’t want to actually pretend to represent them. This way, the content was still theirs. It’s just that the container was mine, and in Twitter’s case, you are the container (sometimes a hollow one, echoing with re-tweets of other people’s echoes).

Bottom line: yes, Twitter continues to be a terrible wild-wild-web platform with no restraints. There must be a landgrab of usernames going on. The terms of service prohibit all but parody impersonation. But this is weak protection, friends. Very weak. Enforcing terms of service for millions of users is impossible. And no, you don’t even need unique email addresses for each new account, there’s an easy way around that.

I don’t know if more control is the answer to chaos, but there might be an opportunity for a precedent case where communication security could be interpreted to encompass all digital communication, including existing and potential instances of a person’s or an entity’s communication channels? It’s a bit like reading someone’s mail just because it accidentally fell from the mailman’s bag in front of your door. But INAL. Here’s an analysis of a court case over identity on Twitter.

What’s next? I think it is too late for Twitter to enforce identity requirements. We’ll see a Twitter bubble burst at some point. The initial quality will be diluted rapidly as identities are compromised and spam, spoofs and other dirty forms of marketing permeate it. We need more transparency and trust in a platform – even if the public profile is a pseudonym or a pen-name, we should be able to trust the structure in background, that there is enforcement even if it doesn’t show. Of course, we don’t have a universal system, and won’t for another 20-50 years (pure speculation). But even a local one would be a step ahead, and the next platform that takes such a step will be the Next Big Thing.

I have found that the user experience with Google has deteriorated over the past two years. In the past couple of months, it has worsened considerably.

First, Google started introducing more and more aggressive spell-checking and correction in the queries. Often, especially with obscure languages like Finnish, Google decides to correct the query, even if the correct spelling would yield numerous results. I remember either Brin or Page (or maybe it was Marissa?) saying that the ideal use case of Google would be that it only returned one result – the one that answers the user’s query exactly. What happened to that notion? The “Did you mean”-function has been very useful and moreso with the advent of two panes of results, one for corrected spellings and one for sic – as it was spelled. Forcing repeated corrections, especially when it broadens the results set, can lead to regression towards the mean. With search results, can lead to mediocrity.

The more worrying new feature has in fact lead to a completely new use behaviour on Google. In the past, one could be fairly confident that the best possible results served to meet the query would be the top results, and rarely had to scroll to the bottom of the page. The new feature of omitting words from the query leads to the user having to scroll to the bottom of the page to make sure no words have been omitted. If there have been, they will discover a line of text: “Tip: These results do not include the word…” There the user is offered a link which leads to the query the user originally wanted to make. Here is an example, where the word “among” has been omitted by Google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=aggression+among+diabetics (odd example, but relevant to research I was conducting recently).

This is incredibly contrived behaviour and arrogate development from Google. I completely understand that the feature has been extensively tested and proven to improve various problematic use cases, but it has also lead to an unforeseen difficulty in using Google. The strength of the search engine that I remember got me using it, was that it included all the typed words in the query, without having to resort to operators like ‘+’ to force a word to appear. In fact, Google even told you that the ‘+’ operator was unnecessary, since all the words were included by default.

There is very little difference in terms of actual experienced quality between the results of major search engines. Studies are divided as to whether there is perceived difference in quality (i.e. where the user knows the results have been generated by Yahoo! or Google), (Bailey, Thomas 2008).

I think Google has more to lose, and while it will be marginal, there are early abandoners as well as early adopters, and the margins will go first. Sheryl Sandberg had us read the Tipping Point as the first Google Book Club (yeah, we had one) book, and the simplistic learnings from there would be good to bear in mind when considering the importance of marginal users’ marginal search results.

EDIT: just got a really good example where Google corrects my query making it useless:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=atlas.ti+variable+playback+speed&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

While we in Finland managed to motivate ourselves to break the 40% mark in the EU elections of 2004 (41.1%), we are seeing possibly the worst, most uninspiring and obscure candidate line-up in the history of the elections. The best-known candidate even says he’ll only stay in Strassbourg for a maximum of two years (Soini’s blog in bad Finnish). The major parties have had trouble filling the candidate lists by the deadlines, and the layman will just have to wonder why should he be interested in the election if even the candidates are reluctant.

In 1999, we dipped almost to 30% (or 31.4% to be exact), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the general voting percentage figure started with the number two in 2009. It may in fact be Soini’s massive prospective protest vote that will push the voter activity in Finland over the watermark.

Here’s the historical tables in Finnish.

EDIT: Jyrki Katainen of Kokoomus forecasts 50% activity, and the general buzz over the election has increased during the last two weeks before the election. Maybe we won’t fare badly. Maybe the odd lists have in fact challenged people to find a candidate they could endorse. Let’s wait til Sunday.

Right now, I’m watching the interview of the parents of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the first school mass murderer in Finland, who killed 8 of his classmates and then himself in November 2007. I was in Australia then and it didn’t really sink in. This phenomenon repeated in Kauhajoki just over a month ago, and the police just released information yesterday that they thwarted a nearly finalized plan to undertake the same in a new school. Looking at the world that kids have to make sense of, having been a kid not too unrecently and now seeing the way this is publicized in the country, I won’t be surprised when it happens again.

Interestingly and importantly, the Finnish media never really judged what had happened in Kauhajoki. Blame was found in the school, in the police, in the gun salesman, in the internet (YouTube, again of course) and in the man’s lack of friends. He was 22 years old, and all of his behaviour mirrored closely that of previous school shootings in the US and Finland. He may have been immature, but the event certainly enlarged the scope of school killings. And he was victimized. He was “driven to do it”, he had “lost his faith in humanity” he was “depressed and lonely”. Fuck. Sounds like a lot of people I know, or at least knew in school. And that includes high school and college.

The media in Denmark and Sweden, for example, called him a “lunatic” or “mass murderer”. This rhetoric was never entered into in Finland. There was very little value judgement. It was a tragedy – it was lamented, but not really condemned.

And now, watching the parents speak of the first event a year later, the whole act of senseless violence, this attack against everyone’s lives and our way of life, is rationalized, explained and put into place. The parents described the ways he was bullied in school (shot with airsoft guns of his way home, made fun of in front of the class…) and how he had in tears asked his mother why he had no friends, “no-one to even play Playstation with”. While the parents say they still can’t really comprehend what happened, to a detached observer it perversely sounds to make sense. How many 15-year olds read the papers and watch these documentaries (this one was widely promoted on Channel 3 in the past two days), feel confused, uncertain and abandoned by the world, and place their lives in the category of the school killer – the person who “was driven to do it”?

The documentary closed with an analysis of children’s psychological disorders and potential risk groups, commented on by an expert closer to 70 years of age than 60, and who said that all behaviour that deviates from the norm should be intervened. How does that sound to the teen who is just forming his or her view of the world and their own place in it? Do they accept an intervention where the choices are made for them? This young person is at a stage in their life where they are just starting to taste the freedom of making their own choices, at the same time seeing that the array of choices available to them is bewildering. Instead of facing the burden of endless choice, do they drive themselves to a situation that ends all pressure of having to choose, where the only choice is the one that they have positioned to themselves as inevitable?

School massacre is not a choice that should be on anyone’s list of options for the future. But like with suicide waves among youths (one seems to be at a tipping point in Finland in Piikkiö, a municipality of 7,500 people where three suicides and one attempt have occurred among youths this fall), there seems to be a need, or at least a tendency to rationalize this behaviour. This is a typical Finnish trait – we need a reason, we refuse to not understand, and this reason needs to be as objective and detached as possible. A reason like that can also be accepted by more people as the truth, no matter how perverse it might be.

Maybe we should understand less, accept more, and aim for sympathy instead of the truth? But along with sympathy to the suffering youth, there must be a value judgment made against the most radical of choices, and this is a practical moral demand, not a theoretical one. While we can argue for (and I often do) and against moral relativity, ending extreme symptoms of suffering is a practical necessity, unless we succumb to absolute nihilism. Do we really believe it is wrong to kill others, no matter how much suffering they have caused us? Yes? No? If not, what is the limit of suffering, and how do we make sure we don’t reach it – the point of no return? The shootings are a symptom, not the illness. There is much to be done to heal the nation.