Boa Constrictors Listen to Your Heart So They Know When You’re Dead

Here’s to the first paper a month post for 2012!

For January I decided to blog a paper I heard about on the excellent Nature podcast about a deliciously simple and elegant experiment to test a very simple question: given how much time and effort boa constrictors (like the one on above, photo taken by Paul Whitten) need to kill prey by squeezing them to death, how do they know when to stop squeezing?

Hypothesizing that boa constrictors could sense the heartbeat of their prey, some enterprising researchers from Dickinson College decided to test the hypothesis by fitting dead rats with bulbs connected to water pumps (so that the researchers could simulate a heartbeat) and tracking how long and hard the boas would squeeze for:

• rats without a “heartbeat” (white)
• rats with a “heartbeat” for 10 min (gray)
• rats with a continuous “heartbeat” (black)

The results are shown in figure 2 (to the right). The different color bars show the different experimental groups (white: no heartbeat, gray: heartbeat for 10 min before stopping, and black: continuous heartbeat). Figure 2a (on top) shows how long the boas squeezed for whereas Figure 2b (on bottom) shows the total “effort” exerted by the boas. As obvious from the chart, the longer the simulated heartbeat went, the longer and harder the boas would squeeze.

Conclusion? I’ll let the paper speak for itself: “snakes use the heartbeat in their prey as a cue to modulate constriction effort and to decide when to release their prey.”

Interestingly, the paper goes a step further for those of us who aren’t ecology experts and notes that being attentive to heartbeat would probably be pretty irrelevant in the wild for small mammals (which, ironically, includes rats) and birds which die pretty quickly after being constricted. Where this type of attentiveness to heartrate is useful is in reptilian prey (crocodiles, lizards, other snakes, etc) which can survive with reduced oxygen for longer. From that observation, the researchers thus concluded that listening for heartrate probably evolved early in evolutionary history at a time when the main prey for snakes were other reptiles and not mammals and birds.

In terms of where I’d go next after this – my main point of curiosity is on whether or not boa constrictors are listening/feeling for any other signs of life (i.e. movement or breathing). Obviously, they’re sensitive to heart rate, but if an animal with simulated breathing or movement – would that change their constricting activity as well? After all, I’m sure the creative guys that made an artificial water-pump-heart can find ways to build an artificial diaphragm and limb muscles… right?

(Image credit – boa constrictor: Paul Whitten) (Figures from paper)

Paper: Boback et al., “Snake modulates constriction in response to prey’s heartbeat.” Biol Letters. 19 Dec 2011. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1105

Kinect for Science

(Cross posted to Bench Press)

We’ve blogged before about applying gaming technology to science, but much of that has been about using games or gaming system chips. A recent Wired magazine article reveals another interesting use case: taking the capabilities of something like Microsoft’s Xbox360 Kinect system and applying it directly to science research!

Apparently, a number of groups have decided to try out the Kinect as a “poor man’s” LIDAR (a tool that can be used to see and measure where things are in three dimensions)/complicated 3D camera setups which are expensive and require sophisticated calibration/post-processing analysis.

Of course, the Kinect is not a panacea: it has much more limited range, requires researchers to build their own analytical software, and the Kinect can’t do high-speed video (yet). But, because of its much lower price, its size, and the availability of drivers because of the active Kinect hacking/DIY community (and the support that even Microsoft is providing for people using Kinect beyond gaming), a number of researchers have decided to embrace the Kinect as a scientific tool.

The article profiles two potential use cases which only begin to scratch the surface of what this technology could be capable of: mapping meltwater lakes that form on top of glaciers (see images below) and studying small body impacts in space.

But, potentially the most valuable use of Kinect? As the Wired article puts it:

The Kinect’s best asset may be that it inspires students, Tedesco said. Rather than a daunting black box with convoluted cables and arcane software, the Kinect is something that many students are already familiar with.

“This creates a different mindset in students,” he said. “They’re not so scared about using the Kinect, and they can really get involved in learning and basic research.”

“I’m actually on my way to buy two of them right now,” he added.

(Image credit – Kinect) (Image credit – Kinect glacier map)

A “Fandroid” Forced to Use an iPhone 4 for Two Weeks

I recently came back from a great two week trip to China and Japan. Because I needed an international phone plan/data access, I ended up giving up my beloved DROID2 (which lacks international roaming/data) for two weeks and using the iPhone 4 my company had given me.

Because much has changed in the year and a half since I wrote that first epic post comparing my DROID2 with an iPhone 4 – for starters, my iPhone 4 now runs the new iOS 5 operating system and my DROID2 now runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread — I thought I would revisit the comparison, having had over a year to use both devices in various capacities.

Long story short: I still prefer my DROID2 (although to a lesser extent than before).

So, what were my big observations after using the iPhone 4 for two weeks and then switching back to my DROID2?

• Apple continues to blow me away with how good they are at
  • UI slickness: There’s no way around it – with the possible exception of the 4.0 revision of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (which I now have and love on my Motorola Xoom!) – no Android operating system comes close to the iPhone/iPad’s remarkable user interface smoothness. iOS animations are perfectly fluid. Responsiveness is great. Stability is excellent (while rare, my DROID2 does force restart every now and then — my iPhone has only crashed a handful of times). It’s a very well-oiled machine and free of the frustrations I’ve had at times when I. just. wished. that. darn. app. would. scroll. smoothly.
  • Battery life: I was at or near zero battery at the end of every day when I was in Asia – so even the iPhone needs improvement in that category. But, there’s no doubt in my mind that my DROID2 would have given out earlier. I don’t know what it is about iOS which enables them to consistently deliver such impressive battery life, but I did notice a later onset of “battery anxiety” during the day while using the iPhone than I would have on my DROID2.
• Apple’s soft keyboard is good – very good — but nothing beats a physical keyboard plus SwiftKey. Not having my beloved Android phone meant I had to learn how to use the iPhone soft keyboard to get around – and I have to say, much to my chagrin, I actually got the hang of it. Its amazingly responsive and has a good handle on what words to autocorrect, what to leave alone, and even on learning what words were just strange jargon/names but still legitimate. Even back in the US on my DROID2, I find myself trying to use the soft keyboard a lot more than I used to (and discovering, sadly, that its not as good as the iPhone’s). However:
  • You just can’t type as long as you can on a hard physical keyboard.
  • Every now and then the iPhone makes a stupid autocorrection and it’s a little awkward to override it (having to hit that tiny “x”).
  • The last time I did the iPhone/DROID comparison, I talked about how amazing Swype was. While I still think it’s a great product, I’ve now graduated to SwiftKey(see video below) not only because I have met and love the CEO Jonathan Reynolds but because of its uncanny ability to compose my emails/messages for me. It learns from your typing history and from your blog/Facebook/Gmail/Twitter and inputs it into an amazing text prediction engine which not only predicts what words you are trying to type but also the next word after that! I have literally written emails where half of my words have been predicted by SwiftKey.

     

• Notifications in iOS are terrible.
  • A huge issue for me: there is no notification light on an iPhone. That means the only way for me to know if something new has happened is if I hear the tone that the phone makes when I get a new notification (which I don’t always because its in my pocket or because – you know – something else in life is happening at that moment) or if I happen to be looking at the screen at the moment the notifications shows up (same problem). This means that I have to repeatedly check the phone throughout the day which can be a little obnoxious when you’re with people/doing something else and just want to know if an email/text message has come in.
  • What was very surprising to me was that despite having the opportunity to learn (and dare I say, copy) from what Android and WebOS  had done, Apple chose quite possibly the weakest approach possible. Not only are the notifications not visible from the home screen – requiring me to swipe downward from the top to see if anything’s there — its impossible to dismiss notifications one at a time, really hard (or maybe I just have fat fingers?) to hit the clear button which dismisses blocks of them at a time, even after I hit clear, I’m not sure why some of the notifications don’t disappear, and it is surprisingly easy to accidentally hit a notification when you don’t intend to (which will force you into a new application — which wouldn’t be a big deal if iOS had a cross-application back button… which it doesn’t). Maybe this is just someone who’s too used to the Android way of doing things, but while this is way better than the old “in your face” iOS notifications, I found myself very frustrated here.
• Cursor positioning feels a more natural on Android. I didn’t realize this would bug me until after using the iPhone for a few days. The setup: until Android’s Gingerbread update, highlighting text and moving the caret (where your next letter comes out when you type) was terrible on Android. It was something I didn’t realize in my initial comparison and something I came to envy about iOS: the magnifying glass that pops up when you want to move your cursor and the simple drag-and-drop highlighting of text. Thankfully with the Gingerbread update, Android completely closes that gap (see image on the right) and improves upon it. Unlike with iOS, I don’t need to long-hold on the screen to enter some eery parallel universe with a magnified view – in Android, you just click once, drag the arrow to where you want the cursor to be, and you’re good to go.
• No widgets in iOS. There are no widgets in iOS. I can see the iOS fans thinking: “big deal, who cares? they’re ugly and slow down the system!” Fair points — so why do I care? I care because widgets let me quickly turn on or off WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS from the homescreen in Android, but in iOS, I would be forced to go through a bunch of menus. It means, on Android, I can see my next few calendar events, but in iOS, I would need to go into the calendar app. It means, on Android I can quickly create a new Evernote note and see my last few notes from the home screen, but in iOS, I would need to open the app. It means that on Android I can see what the weather will be like from the homescreen, but in iOS, I would need to turn on the weather app to see the weather. It means that on Android, I can quickly glance at a number of homescreens to see what’s going on in Google Voice (my text messages), Google Reader, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, but on iOS, I need to open each of those apps separately. In short, I care about widgets because they are convenient and save me time.
• Apps play together more nicely with Android. Android and iOS have a fundamentally different philosophy on how apps should behave with one another. Considering most of the main iOS apps are also on Android, what do I mean by this? Well, Android has two features which iOS does not have: a cross-application back button and a cross-application “intent” system. What this means is that apps are meant to push information/content to each other in Android:
  • If I want to “share” something, any app of mine that mediates that sharing – whether its email, Facebook, Twitter, Path, Tumblr, etc – its all fair game (see image on the right). On iOS, I can only share things through services that the app I’m in currently supports. Want to post something to Tumblr or Facebook or over email in an app that only supports Twitter? Tough luck in iOS. Want to edit a photo/document in an app that isn’t supported by the app you’re in? Again, tough luck in iOS. With the exception of things like web links (where Apple has apps meant to handle them), you can only use the apps/services which are sanctioned by the app developer. In Android, apps are supposed to talk with one another, and Google goes the extra mile to make sure all apps that can handle an “action” are available for the user to choose from.
  • In iOS, navigating between different screens/features is usually done by a descriptive back button in the upper-left of the interface. This works exactly like the Android back button does with one exception. These iOS back buttons only work within an application. There’s no way to jump between applications. Granted, there’s less of a need in iOS since there’s less cross-app communication (see previous bullet point), but when you throw in the ability of iOS5’s new notification system to take you into a new application altogether and when you’re in a situation where you want to use another service, the back button becomes quite handy.
• And, of course,  deluge of the he-said-she-said that I observed:
  • Free turn-by-turn navigation on Android is AWESOME and makes the purchase of the phone worth it on its own (mainly because my driving becomes 100x worse when I’m lost). Not having that in iOS was a pain, although thankfully, because I spent most of my time in Asia on foot, in a cab, or on public transit, it was not as big of a pain.
  • Google integration (Google Voice, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Maps) is far better on Android — if you make as heavy use of Google services as I do, this becomes a big deal very quickly.
  • Chrome to Phone is awesome – being able to send links/pictures/locations from computer to phone is amazingly useful. I only wish someone made a simple Phone-to-Chrome capability where I could send information from my phone/tablet to a computer just as easily.
  • Adobe Flash performance is, for the record, not great and for many sites its simply a gateway for advertisements. But, its helpful to have to be able to open up terrible websites (especially those of restaurants) — and in Japan, many a restaurant had an annoying Flash website which my iPhone could not open.
  • Because of the growing popularity of Android, app availability between the two platforms is pretty equal for the biggest apps (with just a few noteworthy exceptions like Flipboard). To be fair, many of the Android ports are done haphazardly – leading to a more disappointing experience – but the flip side of this is that the more open nature of Android also means its the only platform where you can use some pretty interesting services like AirDroid (easy-over-Wifi way of syncing and managing your device), Google Listen (Google Reader-linked over-the-air podcast manager), BitTorrent Remote (use your phone to remote login to your computer’s BitTorrent client), etc.
  • I love that I can connect my Android phone to a PC and it will show up like a USB drive. iPhone? Not so much (which forced me to transfer my photos over Dropbox instead).
  • My ability to use the Android Market website to install apps over the air to any of my Android devices has made discovering and installing new apps much more convenient.
  • The iOS mail client (1) doesn’t let you collapse/expand folders and (2) doesn’t let you control which folders to sync to what extents/at what intervals, but the Android Exchange client does. For someone who has as many folders as I do (one of which is a Getting Things Done-esque “TODO” folder), that’s a HUGE plus in terms of ease of use.

To be completely fair – I don’t have the iPhone 4S (so I haven’t played with Siri), I haven’t really used iCloud at all, and the advantages in UI quality and battery life are a big deal. So unlike some of the extremists out there who can’t understand why someone would pick iOS/Android, I can see the appeal of “the other side.” But after using the iPhone 4 for two weeks and after seeing some of the improvements in my Xoom from Ice Cream Sandwich, I can safely say that unless the iPhone 5 (or whatever comes after the 4S) brings with it a huge change, I will be buying another Android device next. If anything, I’ve noticed that with each generation of Android, Android devices further closes the gap on the main advantages that iOS has (smoothness, stability, app selection/quality), while continuing to embrace the philosophy and innovations that keep me hooked.

(Image Credit – Android text selection: Android.com) (Image Credit – Android sharing: talkandroid.com)

Back from Asia

Apologies for the lack of blogging in recent weeks – as with last year, I was recently in Asia on business and am in the process of catching up on my email backlog. Posts to come soon – I promise!

2011 in blog

The tradition of making a wrapup blog post continues… so what did I do in 2011 as reflected by my blog posts? Well, I…

• Foolishly made a list of 7 resolutions, the 3 easiest of which I completed… (I’ll let you decide which one those were) – hence learning not to do such a thing again
• Made a web-based tool to help glaucoma researchers compute AGIS visual field scores
• First ever trip to China and first ever trip to Tokyo
• Watched a movie about a certain social network which made me somewhat nostalgic for college
• Visited 1800s London, bought a new hat, and found out about my savage ancestors
• Made an impassioned plea to capital-seekers to stop sending horrible pitches to my inbox
• Continued my paper a month streak
• Was very thankful that nobody I knew personally was injured seriously during or immediately after the massive earthquake in Japan
• Changed web browsers (it’s a big deal!)
• Helped my firm kick off our Android focused A-Fund
• Found out I wasn’t the only one who adapted Hamlet into another format
• Said goodbye to a TV show that has kept me company since high school
• Bought a Android Honeycomb tablet and became a tablet convert
• Did some “serious thinking” at the De Young
• Made some recommendations for newbie comic book readers
• Started watching a new cartoon which scratched a certain superhero itch
• Bid farewell to Steve Jobs
• Mourned the loss of Google Reader’s social functionality and thus began using Tumblr (http://tumblr.benjamintseng.com/) as my poor man’s Google Reader substitute
• Read a military biography of one of my childhood heroes

All in all, a good year .

Happy New Year everybody! Here’s to a great 2012 and thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading (and continuing to read) my little corner on the internet!

(Image credit – Nassau Happening))

Mosquitoes are Drawn to Your Skin Bacteria

There’s only two more days left in 2011, so time for my final paper a month post for 2011!

Like with the paper I blogged for last month, this month’s paper (from open access journal PLoS ONE) is yet again about the impact on our health of the bacteria which have decided to call our bodies home. But, instead of the bacteria living in our gut, this month is about the bacteria which live on our skin.

Its been known that the bacteria that live on our skin help give us our particular odors. So, the researchers wondered if the mosquitos responsible for passing malaria (Anopheles) were more or less drawn to different individuals based on the scent that our skin-borne bacteria impart upon us (also, for the record, before you freak out about bacteria on your skin, remember that like the bacteria in your gut, the bacteria on your skin are natural and play a key role in maintaining the health of your skin).

Looking at 48 individuals, they noticed a huge variation in terms of attractiveness to Anopheles mosquitos (measured by seeing how much mosquitos prefer to fly towards a chamber with a particular individual’s skin extract versus a control) which they were able to trace to two things. The first is the amount of bacteria on your skin. As shown in Figure 2 below, is that the more bacteria that you have on your skin (the higher your “log bacterial density”), the more attractive you seem to be to mosquitos (the higher your mean relative attractiveness).

The second thing they noticed was that the type of bacteria also seemed to be correlated with attractiveness to mosquitos. Using DNA sequencing technology, they were able to get a mini-census of what sort of bacteria were present on the skins of the different patients. Sadly, they didn’t show any pretty figures for the analysis they conducted on two common types of bacteria (Staphylococcus and Pseudomonas), but, to quote from the paper:

The abundance of Staphylococcus spp. was 2.62 times higher in the HA [Highly Attractive to mosquitoes] group than in the PA [Poorly Attractive to mosquitoes] group and the abundance of Pseudomonas spp. 3.11 times higher in the PA group than in the HA group.

Using further genetic analyses, they were also able to show a number of other types of bacteria that were correlated with one or the other.

So, what did I think? While I think there’s a lot of interesting data here, I think the story could’ve been tighter. First and foremost, for obvious reasons, correlation does not mean causation. This was not a true controlled experiment – we don’t know for a fact if more/specific types of bacteria cause mosquitos to be drawn to them or if there’s something else that explains both the amount/type of bacteria and the attractiveness of an individual’s skin scent to a mosquito. Secondly, Figure 2 leaves much to be desired in terms of establishing a strong trendline. Yes, if I  squint (and ignore their very leading trendline) I can see a positive correlation – but truth be told, the scatterplot looks like a giant mess, especially if you include the red squares that go with “Not HA or PA”. For a future study, I think it’d be great if they could get around this to show stronger causation with direct experimentation (i.e. extracting the odorants from Staphylococcus and/or Pseudomonas and adding them to a “clean” skin sample, etc)

With that said, I have to applaud the researchers for tackling a fascinating topic by taking a very different angle. I’ve blogged before about papers on dealing with malaria, but the subject matter is usually focused on how to directly kill or impede the parasite (Plasmodium falciparums). This is the first treatment of the “ecology” of malaria – specifically the ecology of the bacteria on your skin! While the authors don’t promise a “cure for malaria”, you can tell they are excited about what they’ve found and the potential to find ways other than killing parasites/mosquitos to help deal with malaria, and I look forward to seeing the other ways that our skin bacteria impact our lives.

(Figure 2 from paper)

Paper: Verhulst et al. "Composition of Human Skin Microbiota Affects Attractiveness to Malaria Mosquitoes." PLoS ONE 6(12). 17 Nov 2011. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028991

Reading About a Childhood Hero

I took advantage of this past holiday weekend by catching up on some reading: in particular, I finished a book by Richard A. Gabriel on a childhood hero of mine: Hannibal – The Military Biography of Rome’s Greatest Enemy (also available on Google Books)

Quick primer for those of you not in the know/not as enthusiastic about Hannibal as I am : the Carthaginian general Hannibal fought in the Second Punic War – the second of three major wars between the two great Mediterranean powers of their day: Rome and Carthage. These wars were among the first true “world wars” that the world saw – in terms of bringing great powers to war and in terms of sheer devastation of life and property– and set the stage for Rome to eventually take over the entire Mediterranean.

So, why is Hannibal a childhood hero of mine? Well:

• He is the son of one of the greatest Carthaginian generals from the First Punic War – Hamilcar Barca — who, legend has it, made a young Hannibal swear to “never be a friend of Rome” (holy comic book origins, Batman!)
• He was a superb commander of men: whereas the Roman armies were made primarily of Roman citizens, Hannibal’s army consisted of people who spoke many different languages and had vastly different fighting styles: Carthaginian, Spanish, North African, Gallic tribesmen, Italian, Greek, etc.
• His army had elephants! I know that’s not too unique, but seriously – ELEPHANTS!
• He executed one of the boldest and most daring moves in antiquity, marching a massive multicultural army from Spain across the Alps and the Pyrenees into Italy.
• Then, for 15 years, he fought legion after legion in enemy territory, only once receiving very limited supplies and reinforcements from Carthage.
• One of those battles he fought was the famed Battle of Cannae – one of the greatest military victories ever achieved. There, Hannibal’s army of ~50,000 faced a Roman force of ~80-90,000. Despite being outnumbered, Hannibal crushed his Roman adversaries with a brilliant enveloping maneuver – losing some 5-8,000 soldiers (10-20% of Hannibal’s forces) while killing some 40-60,000 (50% of Rome’s forces) and capturing another 5-10,000! Among those killed included one of Rome’s two consuls (the equivalent to a Prime Minister or President), a previous consul, and a number of Roman Senators! In the course of three quick battles ending at Cannae, Hannibal’s forces had killed an estimated 100,000 Romans – believed to be 20% of Rome’s military age population.

I’ll admit, its not the most kid-friendly hero to have but when it came down to it, I was amazed by his life. It takes uncanny ability, stamina, and boldness to be able to operate within enemy territory for 15 years and still win victory after victory.

Its with that enthusiasm that I picked up Gabriel’s book. While I think it’s a wonderful book for anyone who is deeply interested in Hannibal and military history (like your humble blogger), this is not really a biography intended for popular consumption. The book should really be thought of as an academic close read of the works of Livy and Polybius, the two Romans who wrote the most detailed account of the Second Punic War – pointing out where Livy/Polybius’s nationalism or their lack of attentiveness to detail probably led to inaccurate or revisionist accounts of what happened. Its in those moments that the author is simultaneously the most compelling (as Gabriel clearly shows off his amazing knowledge of military history and of the ancient world) and also the most frustrating (as it interferes with the narrative of Hannibal’s life in the name of the academic purpose).

With that said, ancient/military history buffs will appreciate the attentiveness to detail from the author (and his dismantling of many commonly held beliefs about Hannibal’s failure such as the lack of naval control/siege equipment), and Hannibal devotees (which may just be me ) will appreciate the author’s almost stream of consciousness way of describing what must have been going through Hannibal’s head as he made decision after decision.

In particular, Gabriel’s dissection of why Hannibal was doomed to failure was very compelling. To Gabriel, Hannibal made a number of key mistakes. First, he did not understand that Rome did not view war the way that the Greeks did – where a large defeat or two on the battlefield would lead to one side capitulating – Rome viewed war as a life or death situation – there was no room for negotiation unless they were winning and there was no room for capitulating. Period. Secondly, he did not understand that he was just one front of a grander geopolitical chess game between Carthage and Rome: Carthage was not especially interested in Italy (it would never realistically be able to hold its territory there even if it gained it), it was interested in preserving its holdings in Spain and in the islands of the Mediterranean. It was those two errors which doomed Hannibal to failure especially once Rome realized it could not keep throwing legion after legion at Hannibal and waged a war of attrition.

So, ultimate verdict: this is great if you’re a military history buff or really want to get into the details of Hannibal’s exploits, but there are likely much more accessible reads if you just want to learn a bit more about Hannibal’s life/Punic Wars.

(Image credit – Summa Gallicana)

Phylo

(Cross posted to Bench Press)

A few years ago, I blogged about an ingenious crowdsourced game called Fold.It. The concept was pretty simple:

• Use human intuition to help solve complicated three-dimensional protein folding challenges which is oftentimes as effective but significantly faster & cheaper than computational algorithms
• Pool together lots of human volunteers
• Turn the whole experience into a game to get more volunteers to spend more time

The result was a nifty little game which contributed findings which have made it, to date, into a number of peer-reviewed publications (see PNAS paper here and Nature Structure & Molecular Biology paper here)!

Well some researchers at McGill University in Canada want to take a page out of this playbook with a game they built called Phylo (HT: MedGadget) to help deal with another challenging issue in bioinformatics: multiple sequence alignment. In a nutshell, to better understand DNA and how it impacts life, we need to see how stretches of DNA line up with one another. Now, computers are extremely good at taking care of this problem for short stretches of DNA and for “roughly” aligning longer stretches of DNA – but its fairly difficult and costly to do it accurately for long stretches using computer algorithms.

People, however, are curiously intuitive about patterns and shapes. So, the researchers turned the multiple sequence alignment problem into a puzzle game they’ve called Phylo (see image below) where the goal is to line up multiple colored blocks. Players tackle the individual puzzles (in a browser or even on their mobile phone) and the researchers aggregate all of this into improved sequence alignments which help them better understand the underlying genetics of disease.

And how has it been doing? According to the McGill University press release:

So far, it has been working very well. Since the game was launched in November 2010, the researchers have received more than 350,000 solutions to alignment sequence problems. “Phylo has contributed to improving our understanding of the regulation of 521 genes involved in a variety of diseases. It also confirms that difficult computational problems can be embedded in a casual game that can easily be played by people without any scientific training,” Waldispuhl said. “What we’re doing here is different from classical citizen science approaches. We aren’t substituting humans for computers or asking them to compete with the machines. They are working together. It’s a synergy of humans and machines that helps to solve one of the most fundamental biological problems.”

With the new games and platforms, the researchers are hoping to encourage even more gamers to join the fun and contribute to a better understanding of genetically-based diseases at the same time.

Try it out – I have to admit I’m not especially good with puzzle games, so I haven’t been doing particularly well, but the researchers have done a pretty good job with the design of the game (esp. relative to many other academic-inspired gaming programs that I’ve seen) – and who knows, you might be a key contributor to the next big drug treatment!

Qualcomm Trying to Up its PR with Snapdragon Stadium

As a nerd and a VC, I’m very partial towards “enabling technologies” – the underlying technology that makes stuff tick. That’s one reason I’m so interested in semiconductors: much of the technology we see today has its origins in something that a chip or semiconductor product enabled. But, despite the key role they (and other enabling technologies) play in creating the products that we know and love, most people have no idea what “chips” or “semiconductors” are.

Part of that ignorance is deliberate – chip companies exist to help electronics/product companies, not steal the spotlight. The only exception to that rule that I can think of is Intel which has spent a fair amount over the years on its “Intel Inside” branding and the numerous Intel Inside commercials that have popped up.

While NVIDIA has been good at generating buzz amongst enthusiasts, I would maintain that no other semiconductor company has quite succeeded at matching Intel in terms of getting public brand awareness – an awareness that probably has helped Intel command a higher price point because the public thinks (whether wrongly or rightly) that computers with “Intel inside” are better.

Well Qualcomm looks like they want to upset that. Qualcomm make chips that go into mobile phones and tablets and has benefitted greatly from the rise in smartphones and tablets over the past few years, getting to the point where some might say they have a shot at being a real rival for Intel in terms of importance and reach. But for years, the most your typical non-techy person might have heard about them is the fact that they have the naming rights to San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium – home of the San Diego Chargers and former home of the San Diego Padres.

Well, on December 16th, in what is probably a very interesting test by Qualcomm to see if they can boost the consumer awareness of the Snapdragon product line they’re aiming at the next-generation of mobile phones and tablets, Qualcomm announced it will rename Qualcomm Stadium to Snapdragon Stadium for 10 days (coinciding with the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl and Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl) – check out the pictures from the Qualcomm blog below!

Will this work? Well, if the goal is to get millions of people to, overnight, buy phones with Snapdragon chips inside – the answer is probably a no. Running this sort of rebranding for only 10 days for games that aren’t the SuperBowl just won’t deliver the right PR boost. But, as a test to see if their consumer branding efforts raises consumer awareness about the chips that power their phones, and potentially demand for “those Snapdragon watchamacallits” in particular? This might be just what the doctor ordered.

I, for one, am hopeful that it does work – I’m a sucker for seeing enabling technologies and the companies behind them like Qualcomm and Intel get the credit they deserve for making our devices work better, and, frankly, having more people talk about the chips in their phones/tablets will push device manufacturers and chip companies to innovate faster.

(Image credit: Qualcomm blog)

Motorola Solutions Takes on the Tablet

I mentioned a couple of months ago my recent “conversion” to the tablet: how I am now convinced that tablets are more than just a cool consumer device, but represent a new vector of compute power which will find itself going into more and more places.

One particular use case which fascinated me was in the non-consumer setting, what is mostly “fresh territory” for tablet manufacturers to pursue. But, whereas most manufacturers — like Lenovo and Toshiba — are taking on the non-consumer setting by chasing the traditional enterprise technology market, Motorola Solutions, which was spun out from the original Motorola alongside (but separate from) the consumer-oriented Motorola Mobility which was recently acquired by Google — they build things like hardware/IT systems for businesses and governments, has taken a much more customized approach (HT: EETimes) which really embodies some of the strengths of the Android approach.

Instead of building yet another Android Honeycomb tablet, Motorola Solutions has built a ruggedized Android tablet called the ET1 (Enterprise Tablet 1 – hey, they sell mainly to industrial and government customers where you don’t need catchy names ), with the emphasis on the word “ruggedized”. Yes, it has a 7” touchscreen, but this really wasn’t meant for casual consumer use at home: its meant to be used in the field/factory setting, built with a strengthened case and Gorilla Glass screen (so that it can survive drops/spills/impacts), support for external accessories (i.e. barcode scanners, printers, holsters/cases), a special hot-swappable rapid charge battery pack so that you can re-juice the device without interrupting the device function, and a “hardened” (translation: more secure by stripping out unnecessary consumer-oriented capabilities) Android operating system with support for rapidly switching between multiple user profiles (because multiple employees might use the same device on different shifts).

Will this device be a huge success? Probably not by any consumer electronic manufacturer’s metric. After all, the tablet isn’t meant for consumers (and won’t be priced that way or sold through stores/consumer eCommerce sites). But, that’s the beauty of the Android approach. If you’re not building a consumer tablet, you don’t have to. In the same way that Android phone manufacturers/software developers can experiment with different price points/business models in Africa, manufacturers can leverage (and customize) Android to target different use models and form factors entirely to satisfy the needs of specific market segments/ecosystem players, taking what they need and changing/removing what they don’t. I don’t know for sure what Motorola Solutions is aiming to get out of this, but maybe the goal isn’t to put as many of these devices out there as possible but simply to add a few key accounts with which to sell other services/software. I have no idea, but the point is that an open platform lets you do things like this. Or, to put it more simply, as I said before about Linux/Android: “go custom or go home”.

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