The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC’s The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA’s Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here).

Scott’s energy and enthusiasm are infectuos. He held the audience captive and often laughing. The questions at the end were smart and his answers perfectly on target. But most importantly, we all learned a lot last night. I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.

What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.

There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.

What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.

I got the book last night and am about to start reading it – very eagerly so. Scott started with his house in Raleigh and traced all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. He compared what he learned in Raleigh and its various infrastructure experts and officials, to the equivalent services in other geographical places, and traced them back in history. I can’t wait to read the synthesis of all that research. I hope you will read it, too.

But it is a Big Deal. It is the ‘official’ conference of the World Wide Web. Yup, Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, was there. I saw him, though I did not talk to him. I mean, what excuse could I come up with to approach him? Ask him to autograph my web browser?

This year, WWW2010 (which everyone pronounced as ‘dub-dub-dub-twenty-ten’ reminding me of a cardiac arrhythmia), was really four conferences fused into one, or rather three other conferences piggybacking onto the main program: Web Science Conference 2010, 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility and the one I was most interested in (and could afford to attend) the FutureWeb conference.

Of course, whenever I go to a conference I do two things: one is what everyone does – try to learn as much as possible and meet interesting people; the other thing is a professional deformation of sorts – I observe the details of the organization and try to figure out how to use what I see for the next ScienceOnline.

This is the second conference I attended at the Raleigh Convention Center and this time I felt better about the space – it did not seem so overwhelmingly enormous this time. Perhaps there were more people this time. Or perhaps it’s because the place was filled with vendor booths, including by Google, Facebook, Lulu.com and RedHat. Or perhaps the organizers used the space better. Or perhaps the people were less formal in their dress, behavior and mindset which made the whole experience more pleasurable.

Number 1 requirement for a conference is coffee. And there was plentiful, at all times, both on the ground floor and upstairs, as well as pastries, cake and fruit. Grade: A

Number 2 requirement for a conference is good, free wifi with tons of bandwidth. And WWW2010 got it. It was just as stable and just as fast as at ScienceOnline2010, which says something Grade: A+

Number 3 are people. Apart from the ‘home team’ I mentioned above, it was great to finally meet some of the interesting locals that I only knew from online before, including the entire HASTAC crew led by Cathy Davidson, Annie Antón (watch this video where I first heard of her some time ago), Paolo Mangiafico, Greg Corrin and Negar Mottahedeh. And then the non-locals, e.g., Doc Searls and Kathy Gill.

It was also great to see again, after quite a while, old friends – danah boyd, Dan Conover, Janet Edens, Hilary Spenser and Kate of Save Our Sounds who I first met at the AAAS meeting in San Diego back in February. I really wanted to catch up with Dan and Janet so we went out to dinner and drinks on Thursday afternoon and spent hours talking. Grade: A+

Number 4 requirement for a successful conference is an engaged audience. And there sure was – check out the #fw2010 (futureweb) and #www2010 tweets – there were lots! And people on several panels were really good at monitoring the twitter backchannel and even tweeting themselves during their sessions (Negar Mottahedeh was the champion of this!).

Unfortunately some of the panels were more corporate in tone, with PowerPoint presentations and barely any interaction with the audience besides a couple of Q&As at the very end. In the Public Health session all but the last panelist have even left the room before we could ask them any questions, for example. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Certainly Keynotes are, by design, one-to-many, and most panels I attended were quite nicely many-to-many in a very unconference-y style (especially the one on Social Media where the dialogue between the panelists and the audience started right at the begining), so it’s a bummer that some of the more corporate as well as more academic types did not grok it or were not specifically trained for a modern conference format. Grade: B

Number 5 in my book is diversity. While the attendees as a whole seemed quite balanced and diverse, the talks and panels were quite white-male-dominated or white-male-exclusive, with just a couple of great exceptions, most notably danah boyd. The opposing goals of having the people with the greatest name recognition (which are marketing gold for a meeting) or having a diverse group in which everyone feels comfortable and “an insider” are hard to reconcile. It is not surprising that WWW2010, being so Big Deal, erred somewhat toward the former, while smaller, more obscure conferences (like #scio10) can push more for the latter. But don’t get me wrong – I’ve been to many conferences with a much higher testosterone concentration (and lower melanin) than this one, it just wasn’t quite as perfect as theoretically possible. Grade: B-

Number 5 is the program itself. And that was good. Of course, I had to choose what to attend at each time-slot, but there is excellent coverage and videos of everything here, so you can take your own picks. Part of the deal with FutureWeb conference was that we could also attend three of the main WWW2010 Keynote lectures, by Vint Cerf (Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist), danah boyd (Microsoft and Harvard University’s Berkman Center) and Carl Malamud (president and founder of public.resource.org ) so I did not waste that opportunity and attended all three. Cerf was impressive on search, cloud computing, and universal access. Malamud was funny, yet wise, with his advice on how to deal with bureacracies with outdated ways of thinking and still get things done.

For me, danah boyd’s talk was the very best hour of the entire conference – I had to stop live-tweeting as I wanted to listen and focus. Danah packs her talks with information and insight and I did not want to miss anything. And I was not dissappointed. Both in her keynote address and the interview immediatelly afterwards, danah stressed several points but I want to highlight two:

First, many people are now harvesting information from social networks and running it through mathematical models. Then they get smug about it and assume more than data warrant. Just because you collected a huge number of tweets, for example, does not mean that your sample is representative – which racial, socioeconomic and age groups tend to keep their accounts private, or tend not to use hashtags, keywords or Twitter conventions the way others do? You missed them. And even if you didn’t, are the results of the analysis meaningful. Data, like Soylent Green, are People. Without looking at who they are, what they say and why they say it, the most impressive computing models are suspect.

Second, there is a difference between Public and Publicized. If you put something online with a hope it will go viral and be seen by as many strangers as possible, you have done broadcasting – what you did was Publicizing. But if you put something online with an unspoken understanding that it is targeted at a relatively limited number of people, usually personal friends (on Facebook) or regular readership (on blogs and Twitter), that is only Public, not Publicized. Taking that kind of stuff posted online by someone and spreading it to a much wider audience of strangers (or using that data for ’scientific research’) is a violation of privacy. It is at best unthinking and tone-deaf, at worst unethical.

And this is the category error that Facebook just made with their new privacy rules. There is a lot of writing online about Facebook settings these days, and the mood of WWW2010 was decidedly anti-Facebook. Some people ‘unliked’ all their ‘likes’ there during sessions discussing privacy. Someone even deleted his facebook account right on the spot, after danah’s keynote.

Everyone knows that everything you post online is ‘fair game’, it is googleable, findable and potentially spreadable. This is the reason why some people need to be anonymous or pseudonymous online. But putting stuff online is not automatically a licence for everyone and anyone to take it and spread it around. Before you do this to someone, stop and think. Perhaps ask if that is OK. Much of the stuff posted online is posted online to make it easy for friends and grandma to see, not for all the world to see. Not every facebook status update or every tweet is a news broadcast. Turn on your brain before you start treating Public (but meant to be limited) communication between friends into a Publicized flashing banner on every corner of the Internet. Remember that people who post stuff online are Soylent Green – they are People.

A great recent example of something Public becoming Publicized against the original intentions of the author was #boobquake. The original idea was an inside joke, meant to be read by perhaps a thousand regular blog readers, some Twitter followers and Facebook friends, not much more. But then someone came in and took it and ran with it. Suddenly this went viral. What could she do? How to deal with this sudden change in expectations? One solution would have been to delete everything and lock everything down – it was not yours to take in the first place, so now you won’t be able to see it and spread it any more. The other solution, the one Jen McCreight chose, was to play along and to switch from Public to Publicized and milk that moment of fame for all its worth and for a good cause. But for this to work, she needed to rethink and rewrite the original to make it fit for Publicized consumption, so she wrote an update with clarification and then a number of updates about the phenomenon. It was out of her hands, but she could still steer it to some extent and make sure it gets used for the intended purpose. Good for her – but she is an experienced blogger, and an activist with an agenda. What if it was some kid, or n00b, or grandma, completely unprepared for it all? Was it her fault she put stuff online? No, you were a schmuck to take her stuff and run with it. Perhaps unethical.

See the full text of danah’s talk for more details, and a recent interview with her on the topic.

Later that day I attended (and vigorously participated from my seat in the front row) the Future of Social Networks and the Internet panel with Chris DiBona, Henry Copeland, Zeynep Tufekci, Dave Recordon and Wayne Sutton, moderated by Fred Stutzman. Henry reminded us that it took 150 years after Gutenberg printed a bible until the founding of the first daily newspaper and that the current situation on the Web is far too early (the oldest blogs are 13 years old) to be considered developed and mature. We need to be patient and watch, not proclaim the experiment a success or a failure so early in its history. Several mentions of the Dunbar Number, in some cases used correctly, in others not, reminded me I need to get back to my project of studying the application of the concept to the Web and writing a piece about it, as much of the discussion focused on the way the Web is affecting our relationships in the real world, for better or for worse.

The Future of the Media panel was the most contentious. Out of six people on it, there was a clear split down the middle: three people who ‘get it’ and three who don’t – on one side were Michael Clemente (lumbering dinosaur), Sam Matheny (a more limber dinosaur), Penny Muse Abernathy (a bird-like dinosaur), still walking yet fully unaware they are already extinct, and on the other side were highly evolved birds: Paul Jones, Dan Conover and Doc Searls. One has to give it to Michael Clemente – knowing that the camera’s rolling and everyone’s livetweeting, he stuck to his Fox News talking points, even asserting, with a straight face, that there is a wall between news and editorial content on Fox News (though that was devastatingly demonstrated to be wrong by Jon Stewart – the opinionators make the news which the news-heads report the next day).

I came in a little late (as our waiters at lunch were incredibly slow with food and checks) into the The Future of Privacy and the Internet session, with a star-studded collection of panelists, including Annie Antón of NCSU who I wanted to meet for quite a while. Much was said about legal and policy aspects of privacy. Antón noted that privacy settings on many social networking sites, including Facebook, are complex and counter-intuitive and that many people (aside from techies) do not know what these are and how to set them. She also said that this is not a generational issue – some people know and some don’t regardless of age. But I think that this will change with time – both the people’s skills at controlling their privacy and the societal understanding of what privacy means and where to draw the line. In 20 years, when the employers are all people with decades experience online, they will find Facebook profiles (or equivalent) completely devoid of humanizing elements (including drinking party pictures) suspect – is this person really that boring or is that an intentionally clean profile of someone with Presidential (or at least Harvard) aspirations? People will, over the years, become increasinly better at managing their online personas, making sure that searches bring up to the top both their accomplishments and their human sides in perfect measures.

The The Future of Public Health session was the biggest disappointment for me. It was not even a panel – four people got up, gave their PowerPoint presentations and left the room before any questions could be asked. And their presentations fell short of my expectations – I know how much stuff is going on out there, but each speaker focused only on what he/she is currently working on, their own projects, not the state of the field as a whole.

Finally, the conference ended with a Bang – an exciting panel on The Future of Learning:

“Session organizer was Cathy Davidson co-founder of HASTAC – the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (http://www.hastac.org/). Panelists included Laurent Dubois, a Duke University historian of French colonialism and the Caribbean; Mark Anthony Neal, accomplished author, one of the foremost scholars of Black popular culture in America and blogger at the New Black Man website; Negar Mottahedeh, she received national notice for staging the first-ever Twitter Film Festival as well as for serving as a communications node in the Iranian election protests.; Tony O’Driscoll, co-author of “Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration.”"

These people are all on the cutting edge of the educational revolution involving understanding the way technology (Web) is changing the world, the way students operate, and the way education should be done. Their students use the Web in the classroom, publicly grade each other (leading to a much greater motivation and effort and greater quality of work), use Twitter to communicate, and are savvy at using the Web to find information. One person in the audience said that ‘if I open my laptop, my focus on you, the teacher, drops down from 100% to 0%’, I got up and said ‘if I open my laptop and you have a problem with me not listening – you are doing it wrong: you are standing in front and talking. Instead, you should be here with me, next to me, working with me on my laptop.’ I also added that there is an existing model for a more engaging model of a teacher-student relationship and that is graduate school where the teacher/mentor does not lecture, but assigns a project and mentors the student through it.

Program – grade: A

I want to end this summary with a huge Kudos to the Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, an Elon/Pew Internet Project which has been ongoing for quite a few years now, guided by center director Janna Quitney Anderson. The Elon students from the project manned a booth, attended (anywhere between two and six of them per room) every session and manned the cameras (both the big professional camera and a bunch of little Flip cameras) in each session. They set up the website, covered every single session and talk with a nice blog post and associated articles and videos, livetweeted, used Facebook for organizing and archiving stuff, collected photographs on Flickr and videos on YouTube. They were not just very good, but also very fast – before a session is over the clips from its beginning were already up on YouTube! And at least one of them writes an insightful blog – Kassondra Cloos. Grade: A+

The video coverage was so awesome (and it was the weakest aspect of ScienceOnline2010 organization), that I am seriously considering hiring the Elon student crew to do the same job at ScienceOnline2011. I’ll be in touch with them soon.

I have interviewed Vanessa last year so you can learn more about her there.

I received a review copy recently and am halfway through. Once I finish I will post my book review here.

From Publishers Weekly:

Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than chimpanzees, and lesser known, Australian journalist Woods and her fiancé, scientist Brian Hare, conducted research in the bonobos’ only known habitat—civil war–torn Congo. Woods’s plainspoken, unadorned account traces the couple’s work at Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, located outside “Kinshasa in the 75-acre forested grounds of what was once Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s weekend retreat. The sanctuary, founded in 1994 and run by French activist Claudine André, served as an orphanage for baby bonobos, left for dead after their parents had been hunted for bush meat; the sanctuary healed and nurtured them (assigning each a human caretaker called a mama), with the aim of reintroducing the animals to the wild. Hare had only previously conducted research on the more warlike, male-dominated chimpanzee, and needed Woods because she spoke French and won the animals’ trust; through their daily work, the couple witnessed with astonishment how the matriarchal bonobo society cooperated nicely using frequent sex, and could even inspire human behavior. When Woods describes her daily interaction with the bonobos, her account takes on a warm charm. Woods’s personable, accessible work about bonobos elucidates the marvelous intelligence and tolerance of this gentle cousin to humans.”

I have to say that the trip was very much worth making – the exhibit is excellent! I like the way the exhibit is making good use of the space – so many exhibits feel cluttered and an all-out assault on all of one’s senses. Upon entering the room, it looks quite sparse. Yet, once I started going around I saw how much it actually covers, how well organized the exhibit layout is, how much information (including a lot of new-to-me information) is included and presented so very clearly and tastefully, and how much it has something for everyone independent of age, background or interest. And of course – the fossils! Absolutely amazing and stunning fossils! From the magnificent Megalodon jaws, to some of the strangest teeth arrangements one has ever seen in any jaw of any animal.

Then, exhausted and a little faintly from the lack of food yesterday (yes, it was a busy day), I entered the lecture hall afraid I’d fall asleep or pass out in the middle of the talk. I need not have worried – Adam Summers is an amazing speaker. I was able not just to pay attention throughout, I was excited throughout the talk. For a jaded biologist and blogger, when many public lectures tend to present stuff already well known to me, it was refreshing to keep learning new stuff every couple of minutes or so. And not just new factoids, but new questions and new ways of thinking about them – why are sharks larger than bony fish, why sharks have no bone, how do sharks swim, how do sharks and bony fish manage to swim very fast, etc. Questions I never asked myself before.

There were things in there that are outside my realm of expertise, for which I am essentially a layman: engineering principles, a formula I am unfamiliar with, a couple of graphs….yet all of that was made very clear on an intuitive level. How? Because Adam is really good at using analogies (“think of this as…”) and metaphors (snuck into the description without any warning). Be it water-filters, armor, stacks of coins, or houses made of sponges, it all becomes vivid and immediately makes sense.

It is also obvious that a lot of research went into this, yet very few actual data were shown – only the key data that are essential to make the point. This is a public lecture – there is no need to drown the audience in gazillions of graphs and discussions of statistics. The slides, including the images and brief video clips were both beautiful and essential for grasping the point he is making. And then there was quite a lot of humor, mainly of the self-deprecating kind making fun of himself and his students in the context of scientist stereotypes – how they look, talk, think and behave.

All in all – well done. Who ever said that scientists don’t know how to communicate to lay audience, eh?

While Dr.Eggleston conducts research in several areas (and several geographic locationa), in this talk he focused on the ecology, conservation, and restoration of oyster reefs in North Carolina.

Improvements in oyster harvesting technology a century ago almost immediatelly decimated the oyster populations in the estuaries of North Carolina rivers and Atlantic coast. A century of harvesting, particularly harsh during the Great Depression and WWII, led to the current record lows:

Oyster beds are important for more than just a potential source of food for humans. They serve as refuge for young fish from their predators, they break the tides and potentially slow down erosion, and the oysters themselves, as filter-feeders, clean up the water from organic materials. Thus healthy oyster beds are important components of a healthy coastal ecosystem.

While preserving existing ecosystems is always easier, cheaper and more effective than recostructing them – it may take decades for ‘artificial’ ecosystems to start functioning fully as the the natural ones – once the ecosystem is destroyed there is not much one can do but try to rebuild it from scratch. And rebuilding from scratch can be expensive, thus it has to be done in a way that is most likely to be successful, i.e., informed by rigorous scientific research. And this is where Dr.Eggleston and his colleagues come in.

Mathematization of biology in the 1930s-40s by the likes of Fisher, Haldane and Wright was not primarily concerned with conservation issues – those were the beginning of formalization of evolutionary theory and ecology. Yet many of the models built at the time and refined since have important roles to play in conservation decision making. Most of the models have been tested primarily in the terrestrical ecosystems, so more work is needed to establish how they apply to marine environments where movement of individuals is much easier, energy-efficient and faster than on dry land.

The most important ecological model in this case is that of a metapopulation that is composed of a number of small populations with some migration between them. The concepts of ’sources’ – populations with large population growth from which surplus individuals tend to emigrate from – and ’sinks’ – populations which would not be able to sustain themselves if not for individuals that immigrate from elsewhere – are important concepts to keep in mind when devising conservation programs. Analysis of a metapopulation provides the answer to the question if one large space needs to be conserved or rather a number of smaller spaces. In terrestrial ecosystems, it appears that preservation of one large space is a better solution, but studies of marine environments to date suggest this may not be the case there.

Dr.Eggleston’s research is testing the theoretical models, as well as simultaneously using the models to devise conservation strategies. With help from a gadget-happy fisherman, they mapped the entire ocean floor of the bay.

Then, they built about a dozen centers of artificial oyster beds out of B-grade rock and populated those with oysters. Then they started sampling and monitoring the beds as well as the entire bay. A collaborator mapped the direction of water flow within it, which they then tested by monitoring the movement of oyster larvae which are poor swimmers and are thus passively transported by the water currents. The data matched the model quite well.

Interestingly, oyster larvae decide where, after two weeks of passive swimming in the currents, to swim down an attach to the substrate by sensing dopamine. The source of dopamine are other oysters already there. This makes sense, as the likelihood of successful reproduction depends on close proximity (and temporal synchronization) of other oysters during spawning.

The researchers then evaluated each center for several parameters. What they found is that some centers show fast growth, other centers good survival rates, other centers broad range of dispersal of larvae, and yet other centers evolved a level of resistance to disease, and yet no single center was “good at everything”. What they found instead was that, altough neither one of the centers was a net source of oysters, the system (metapopulation) as a whole can sustain itself. Thus, they conclude that conservation should not focus on just one or two ‘best’ locations, but the large area as a whole. Furthermore, the implications of the results of the study is that several more such centers need to be built for the oyster population to become fully self-sustaining as well as a potential source of oysters outside of the area (where presumably they could be farmed for food).

They still do not have the data – too early for that but they are working on it – about the ability of these artificial oyster beds to serve as refuge for young fish against predators, or about the ability of the oysters to clean up the water. But it looks promising for now.

The main idea of the meeting is that evolutionary theory has something to offer in the realm of understanding human societies and thus shaping policies governing aspects of human activity. In the domain of economics, for example, it appears that the classical economics (i.e., the Chicago School) is unbeatable in the corridors of power. Yet, it is essentially faulty and this has been shown many times, including by numerous Nobel Prize winners in Economics. The idea that humans are rational (and perfectly informed) economic players is just plain wrong. Yet our economic policy is built upon that error. Perhaps developing and using models from evolutionary theory can finally bring the well-past-due overturn of the faulty economics and become the basis for smart, modern economic policies. The work is just beginning.

Perhaps the insights from the study of social and eusocial animals, mainly insects, can inform the discussion about social behavior of humans. How do simple rules for simple brains result in complex behaviors of, for example, bee swarms? Perhaps if we used such simple rules, instead of relying on every individual human being highly intelligent, impartial and rational, we can devise policies that will actually work, in various domains of human activity.

Taking into account multi-level selection models of evolution one can start understanding the differences between small-group societies (e.g, in rural areas) and large-group societies (e.g., in large cities), why those result in diefferent behaviors of individual humans living there, and why the differences between the two types of groups often lead to civil wars (often wars we usually do not see or describe as civil wars due to our own myopia, not realizing that a war between two adjacent regions may, in fact, be a war between the city and the country “mentality” – something quite obviously applicable to the US red vs. blue states, really small-town conservatism vs. big-city liberalism). Why imposing large-group organization (i.e., a President and a Parliament, i.e., a ‘centralized government’ of a unified country) may not work in a country like Afghanistan in which the society was always organized via local kin-and-friend networks – evolutionary theory can open our eyes on such questions.

This group of people, coming from a variety of backgrounds including history, anthropology, ecology, economics, psychology, political science, ethology and evolutionary biology, will try to tackle these and similar questions over the years to come. Interestingly, the meeting was apparently an Unconference (though they have never heard of the term before), with discussions starting some months before the event (I presume online), leading to the choices of topics actually discussed in sessions which were free-style discussions, not speeches.

One of the panelists noted that interdisciplinary meetings are usually excercises in misunderstanding, as each participant brings in different language and different axioms, but not this meeting – people actually made an effort, in advance, to study and learn other people’s perspectives before encountering them in the sessions in real life. This made the meeting, judging from the enthusiasm of all panelists, a resounding success.

This was the first time I ever visited NESCent (though I was excited when I first heard about its founding five years ago) and it was really nice to see Craig McClain and Robin Ann Smith again, as well as to meet, for the first time in real life, John Logsdon who blogs on Sex, Genes and Evolution and has come to NESCent for a nine-year sabbatical.

I could attend only the Monday morning portion of the meeting, but Sabine Vollmer was at the Symposium for the whole thing and wrote two blogs posts about the rest of the program here and here with a lot of details.

There were four broad themes entertained by the symposium: Personalized Medicine, Behavioral Neuroscience of Alcoholism, Global Climate Change and Education Opportunity and Achievement. Each of the themes had its own breakout session later, but Monday morning was reserved for Keynote Speakers, one on each of the four topics, each of interest to me in one way or another.

Let me first dispose of the things I did not like about the conference before I get into things I liked. Over the past few years, most of the conferences I go to are informal, unconference or unconference-like events: from Scifoo in Mountain View, to Science FEST in Trieste, to ConvergeSouth in Greensboro, to our own ScienceOnline meetings. Even the ‘real’ science meeting I like to go to, the SRBR meeting, is very relaxed and informal – shorts-and-Hawaiian-shirt-clad scientists giving funny and entertaining talks about their new findings in my own field, with internal jokes, calling out friends in the audience and occasional hackling joke from the room (OK, OK, I overstate – folks are mostly nice and polite, especially when the talk is given by someone younger, e.g, a properly dressed graduate student, waiting in attentive silence until the end and then asking proper questions afterwards, but still, the general atmosphere is friendly and relaxed).

I realize of course that different conferences require different setup and different levels of formality. Not everything is a Bar Camp. While I was personally uncomfortable wearing my suit-and-tie costume at the IASP meeting, I understood that this was a business meeting in a business venue with businessmen (and a handful of businesswomen) in business attire talking about business. But this one, I think, was a mismatch. All (or almost all) speakers were scientists talking about science. Almost everyone in the audience were scientists. For this kind of meeting, the organization was far too formal. And not just in pomp and ceremony and dress-code. For example, if you look at the abstracts, they don’t really say anything about the topic of the talk – they go in great detail about the speaker, including all the past and present appointments, awards and honorary degrees. This indicates that the organizers were more interested in the power hierarchy (i.e., ‘look at VIPs we managed to get here to talk’) instead of the substance of what they are saying. It felt more like a big corporate show-off than a conference meant for an exchange of ideas.

Then, there was no time designated for Question & Answer periods after the talks. I wanted to ask questions, but there was just no mechanism for doing so. I understand there were panels afterwards, but even those were built strangely – with panelists, after each gave a separate talk, sitting at a table on a podium above the audience, physically looking down at the audience, thus psychologically inhibiting all but the bravest from actually speaking up. I do not know how it went, but I doubt it was a free-wheeling discussion. Then, the talks. Two speakers actually read their talks. Arrrgh! Yawn (and I was FULL of caffeine).

Others were much better. Howard McLeod gave a good, clear introduction into personal genomics and personal medicine, its pros and cons. Robert Jackson from Duke provided a good summary of the current state of science of climate change. Ronald Dahl talked about adolescent brain development (something I am very interested in, both professionally and as a father of two adolescents), especially the lengthening of the period between onset of puberty which arrives earlier and earlier (the timing of which is not matched by an earlier development of other brain functions, including self-control) and the delay of societally approved age for onset of sexual activity (including marriage). Thus the duration of the period during which adolescents are sexually mature (but not entirely emotionally mature) but discouraged from sexual activity is getting longer and longer – which is an obvious problem. Couple that with the tendency of adolescents to be unable to resist, despite personal fear, engaging in risky behaviors, problems like teen alcoholism and traffic accidents are on the rise.

Lunch Keynote Speaker, Ralph Tarter, was the biggest dissapointment. His talk about bridging the Two Cultures and lessons from Hollywood was surprising for its naivete easily detectable by anyone who’s been reading science blogs for more than a year or so (including Framing Wars, response to Sizzle and response to Unscientific America, along with bloggers who routinely write about history of science). It was infused with nostalgia for good old days when scientists and poets drank wine and talked together (ehm, scientists and poets at the time were the one and the same people – that was Victorian era when gentlemen of means could afford to indulge themselves in such pastimes as philosophy, natural history and poetry and meeting their like-minded buddies at the pub). Science today is a very different business, specialized, expensive, profesionalized and rightly so. That’s progress. The worst part was the lunch talk was the last point – a very erroneous analogy between peer-review of grants and movie reviews. First error: grants are reviewed before they are funded – movies are reviewed after they are funded. Second, as much as the grant review is prone to error, it is still done by well-meaning teams of scientists who are at least trying to evaluate the proposals according to their merits. Yes, outlandish proposals have a harder time than bandwagon stuff or conservative approaches, but it is at least attempted to be done fairly. Which movie gets funded is totally up to whims of movie moguls and producers. I bet even smaller percentage of submitted movie scripts gets actually made into movies than a proportion of grant proposals that gets funded. And while grant reviewers may look at the past publishing records of the grant submitters, the movie magnates are not in any way swayed by the statistics of positive or negative views of particular actors by movie critics in the media.

The highlight of the day was the talk by James Evans. I know Jim well, but I have never seen him speak before. And he blew me away. He knew that all the other speakers on the Personalized Medicine topics will be over-optimistic, so he took it on himself to provide a counter-view, a summary of cautionary notes backed up by data and a nice dose of humor. It was a very energetic and fun talk that explained very clearly what claims by personal genomics companies really mean, why they are so seductive if you don’t stop to think about them, and how they stack up against reality.

What is a projectile weapon? It is something that can be thrown far away – more than just a couple of meters – and with sufficient power to seriously injure or kill a large animal. A non-projectile weapon, even if it can be thrown with force to a shorter distance of a couple of meters, requires either ambush hunting or chasing the prey into a corner or a bog where it can be approached and stabbed from a close distance. A projectile weapon allows hunters to hunt out in the open, perhaps just hiding in the tall grass. Thus two types of weaponry target different kinds of prey.

But inventing projectile weapons requires refinement in technical skills of making them, technical skills in throwing them, and changes in anatomy to make projectile weapons effective. And once invented, projectile weapons have novel ecological impacts, including impacts on further cultural evolution of humans.

This is what Dr.Churchill is studying. He is focusing on Europe, the invention of projectile weapons by modern (“Cro-Magnon”) humans and lack of such invention in Neanderthals, how that impacted the ecological relationship between the two species, and how that contributed to Neanderthal extinction as well as extinction (through competitive exclusion, as well as direct competition by killing) of all the large European carnivores except wolves.

In the talk, Dr.Churchill surveyed several different aspects of his research. He is approaching the question from several different angles. One is the study of spear tips in the archaeological record – their shape and size, the weight, the aerodynamics of the shape, etc. all tell something about their use as either close-contact or projectile weapons. Some (rare) spear handles and spear-throwers tell their own stories.

Then there is the fossil record of humans, Neanderthals and other large carnivores that show numbers and geographical distributions, migrations and dates of extinctions.

Next, there are anatomical cues – skeleton is malleable during development and bones in the upper arm develop differently in cultures that use contact weapons versus those that use projectile weapons as the stabbing technique is different from the throwing technique – throwers have different torsion angles in the humerus and also the humerus of one arm gets thicker than that of the other arm – this pattern is found in humans, but not in Neanderthals.

Finally, the general shape of Neanderthals would make them strong stabbers but poor throwers, so even if they tried throwing (perhaps by seeing the spears used that way by modern humans) they would not have been effective hunters with that technique.

Then, there are wounds in the bones of some fossil humans and Neanderthals. By conducting an experiment – throwing spears into pig carcasses at various speeds, powers and distances (yes, throwing done by a machine) and analyzing the effects on bones – Churchill and his students could conclude that the wounds in the fossil bones were indeed the result of projectile weapons thrown from a distance.

The talk was, as is usually the case on these occasions, a quick survey of various studies. I did not read all the papers by him or his competitors, so I cannot write anything from a position of my own expertise. But my feeling is this: Each piece of evidence he showed is weak on its own, but put together they make a strong case. And the strength is not purely additive, i.e., in the sense that more data is stronger than fewer data. The strength comes from consilience. Let me try to explain how that works.

Let’s call his preferred hypothesis ‘Hypothesis A’. One piece of evidence he shows is consistent with Hypothesis A, and weakens (or eliminates) an alternative Hypothesis B, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis C. Another piece of evidence is consistent with his Hypothesis A, and weakens an alternative Hypothesis C, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis D. Yet another piece of evidence is consistent with his Hypothesis A, and weakens an alternative Hypothesis D, but is also strongly vulnerable to alternative Hypothesis B. When you look at all of his evidence together, all of it is consistent with Hypothesis A and all alternatives look weak. Thus with all pieces being individually weak, the whole edifice still looks very powerful.

Now, to make clear, Dr.Churchill pointed out several times that the research he focuses on, his Hypothesis A, is not the one and only explanation for the extinction of Neanderthals (and other large predators). He just asserts that it is an important component of the process that led to this result and perhaps a more important component than some other people in the field are ready to admit. Of course, that’s how science works: different people focus on different aspects of a problem, and the strength of each person’s data will determine how the whole picture is built in the end.

This was definitely an interesting talk on a topic I never thought about before. DeLene was also there and wrote her thoughts about the lecture on her blog Wild Muse as well as on the Science In The Triangle blog.

Lisa Sanders came to the Triangle last month and gave talks at Duke and UNC. Bride of Coturnix and I went to the UNC talk which filled a large auditorium. Her book is being read by all the UNC medical and nursing students who will then discuss the book in smaller groups.

The process of diagnosis has three steps: interview, physical exam and laboratory tests.

Laboratory tests have become more and more dominant as the preferred part of the diagnosis process, for a number of (cultural) reasons:

First, they are the quickest, thus save the physician time (others do the work).

Second, unlike interviews that seem subjective, or physical exams that look medieval, lab tests look like ScienceTM! – there are numbers there. And you can’t argue against numbers, can you? This works great on the background of lack of statistical sophistication (or outright innumeracy) on the part of both physicians and patients. No arguing. No second opinions. The process moves on smoothly for everyone. Except, the numbers cannot be trusted as much they usually are.

Third, a number is not an opinion, thus it is a safeguard against lawsuits. It saves physician’s asses in such cases. Both the frenzy and the (perceived) lack of time and the fear of lawsuits would be diminished if we had a real healthcare reform (not the compromise of a compromise of a compromise bill that is brewing in the US Senate right now, but an actual reform) in which the physicians could get their authority and trust back and be able to practice their art and craft and science with some degree of freedom. In a system in which insurance companies determine how care is done, physicians are just technicians and cannot earn authority and trust.

So, with everyone jumping onto lab tests, the art of interview and the art of physical examination are slowly dying out. They are not even taught in some medical schools any more. Where they are taught, as soon as newly minted physicans are on their own they join the medical culture that frowns upon these two steps of the diagnostic process.

Yet, Dr.Sanders showed data from two studies (done in different countries by different people in different years), both providing almost exactly the same results. In about 75-80% of the cases (physician encountering a new patient for the first time), the physician comes up with a correct diagnosis after the interview. In about 10-12% of the cases, the doctor has to correct her/himself after the physical exam in order to arrive at the correct diagnosis. And in only the remaining 10-12% or so cases did the lab tests provide information that forced the physician to change one’s mind and come up with the correct diagnosis. In 8 out of 10 cases, the interview was sufficient!

When asked why they are shunning the interviews, physicians respond that they have no time – the system is forcing them to see too many patients per day. A study shows that physicians interrupt patients’ stories abruptly, very soon, sometimes as early as 3 seconds into the interview. Yet, in another study, when doctors were asked specifically not to interrupt, the interviews lasted only one minute longer. Just one minute! Thus interruption does not really save any time – it’s an illusion.

But what is more important is that the interruption itself means something. First, it means that the physician is not really listening. Second, it tells the patient that the doctor is not listening. By relaxing for that extra minute and actively listening to the patient, not just fishing for diagnostically important information in the account but also listening to hear how the patient perceives him/herself, and how that perception is altered by the illness, the physician gains a better understanding of the patient, can probably come up with a better diagnosis and, most importantly, gains trust with the patient. That trust is very important later, when the physician needs to rely on the patients to be disciplined about the treatment. The interruption loses that trust, something that smooth-talking medical quacks are quick to jump on, offering to listen even if their treatments are completely bogus.

What a patient does during the interview is story-telling. A physician needs to be trained to listen to and understand such stories – to glean how the change in health status affects the self-confidence, self-view and self-worth of the patient, how it changes one’s life-plans and ambitions, what fears it brings, what difficult adjustments in lifestyle it requires. To see the patient as a person, not just a disease.

And then, the story-telling does not end with the interview. The physicians and nurses need to communicate with each other about the patient and that also entails, when done right, story-telling (which need not be spoken, it can be in the chart). Finally, the healthcare providers need to know how to tell the story back to the patient, both to convey the diagnosis and to gain the trust needed for the patient to accept and follow through with the treatment. Quick recitatiton of code-numbers and Latin words just won’t do.

So Lisa Sanders, with her book, her column, her advising of House MD and her speaking tour, tries to teach the importance of the interview and the physical exam, the art of listening and storytelling. I am glad that UNC is taking her seriously.

The next day, a bunch of us met with Dr.Sanders at the West End Wine Bar in Durham. It was great fun to talk to her in an informal setting and to ask questions that I did not dare ask at the public talk in front of hundreds of med school professors and students and something like the entire nursing school of UNC. After all, my only perspective on medicine is from the position of a patient (and a reader of some med-blogs) so I learned a lot, yet was aware how little I actually know about medical training and practice. Anton organized that meet-up with the local science communicators and wrote his summary of the week’s events on his blog: