Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age - Part Two

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 18

Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller

This gem from Whimsley makes the point - with extensive statistical modeling supporting the argument - that our algorithm-obsessed, long tail merchants are actually depleting the overall choice pool despite the fact that as individuals we may be experiencing a sense of more choice through recommendations engines...

Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to "niche culture". Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.

In short, the long tail has gangrene at its extremity - the niche. More disarming is the conclusion that it isn't just the output of our recommendation algorithms that is leading to what the author calls "monopoly populism"and the end of niche culture:

"The recommender "system" could be anything that tends to build on its own popularity, including word of mouth...Our online experiences are heavily correlated, and we end up with monopoly populism...A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture.

The network effects that so characterize Internet services are a positive feedback loop where the winners take all (or most). The issue isn't what they bring to the table, it is what they are leaving behind.

here is a link to yesterday's post: More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

Tomorrow: The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.

ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos

by James Turner | comments: 22

If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She will be giving a talk entitled Real Hackers Program DNA at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, March 9-12, in San Jose, California. And she's joining us here today. Thank you for taking the time.

RESHMA SHETTY: No problem. Happy to be here.

JAMES TURNER: So first of all, how do you make bacteria smell nice, and why? I get an image of a commercial, "Mary may have necrotizing fasciitis, but at least her hospital room smells minty fresh."

RS: Well, the original inspiration for the project was the fact that for anybody who works in a lab, who works with E. coli, when you grow cultures of the stuff, it just smells really bad. It smells really stinky, basically. And so our thought was, "Hey, why don't we reengineer the smell of E. coli? It'll make the lab smell minty fresh, and it's also a fun project that gets people, who maybe aren't normally excited about biology, interested in it because it's a very tangible thing. I can smell the change I made to this bacteria."

JT: So what was the actual process involved?

RS: So the process was, you basically take a gene, we took a gene from the petunia plant, which normally provides an odor to the flower, and you place that gene into the E. coli cell. And by supplying the cell with an appropriate precursor, you make this minty smell as a result. So it's fairly straightforward.

JT: Your degree, biological engineering, is a new one to me. How is it different from biochemistry or microbiology or genomics or any of the other traditional biotech degrees?

RS: Well, biology and biochemistry, and so on, are concerned with studying the natural world. So I'm going to go out and figure out how the natural world works. Biological engineering, instead, is really all about saying, "Hey, we have this natural world around us. Biology is, in some sense, a new technology through which we can build new engineered biological systems." Right? So the idea is, what's the difference between physics and electrical engineering? Electrical engineers want to go build. So in biological engineering, we're interested in going and building stuff, too. But using biology, rather than physics, as the underlying science of it.

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