2008 – Page 3 – David Bradley

Polymer, Nanotech, Vitamins

This week the Alchemist hears how polymer chemists are turning to supramolecular chemistry (or is it supramolecular chemists turning to polymers?) to create novel flexible and elastic materials. In nanotechnology, a British consumer activist organization is calling for more safety data on nano materials used in cosmetics, and French scientists have demonstrated how nitrogen oxides released by snow melt in the Arctic could have a global impact.

In biological research, US scientists are suggesting that a specific active form of vitamin D could be useful as a protective agent against nuclear incidents. And, in interplanetary chemistry, Johns Hopkins researchers have found spectroscopic evidence that water-bearing opal formed on Mars much more recently than previously thought.

Finally, we’re going Dutch with this week’s award in which technology transfer in the area of solar energy conversion brings a financial reward and prestige to a graduate student and his colleagues. Get the full skinny and the links in current issue of The Alchemist

Melanotan Suntan in a Syringe

What is safest? (a) The risk of daily and then weekly injections of an untested compound targeted at activating your pigment cells to give you an all-over suntan without having to spend time in the sun or on a UV sunbed or (b) The great outdoors and a healthy approach to sun exposure?

For a group of delightful young women in Northern England, where the sun shines strongly only rarely I can tell you having grown up there, the answer was obvious – (a) the regular injections.

But, what are they injecting daily for a week and then weekly thereafter? What is this compound that stimulates a higher than normal skin pigmentation level and gives the young women the appearance of having just returned from a fortnight lounging by the pool somewhere much warmer and sunnier than oop north? Well, it is called Melanotan and it’s illegal in the UK, i.e. it has not received approval from the medical authorities. It is nevertheless, being sold illegally over the internet and in some tanning salons and body building gyms.

So, is it worrying is that melanotan has not gone through the full gamut of safety tests required of pharmaceutical products, and yet the young women seem unconcerned when confronted with that fact in the following BBC news video clip.

There is the possibility that it is perfectly safe and if not perfectly safe then safer than ultraviolet tanning beds, and according to cancer charities possibly a whole lot safer than chronic sunbathing. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has said that injecting Melanotan could have serious side-effects. But, given that full clinical trials have not yet been completed, they could just as easily have said that it could have no serious side-effects.

Melanotan purportedly boosts the body’s production of melanin, the natural pigment produced by the skin on exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. To be honest, to my eye, none of the young women in the video even looked particularly tanned.

Apparently, there are two versions of the injectable suntan – melanotan I and melanotan II and both are analogs of the naturally occurring peptide hormone alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone. I’d certainly never consider injecting with any hormone except under doctor’s orders and certainly not for the sake of getting an artificial tan. If the health experts are right and there are safety problems with melanotan, then who’s to say these girls aren’t putting themselves at risk of some nasty effects, melanoma in a syringe, perhaps?

But, like I say, I much prefer the great outdoors and a sensible attitude to sun exposure. (Oh, except for that time I got burnt on that warmer and sunnier fortnight).

Virtual Rehabilitation for MS Sufferers

I recently wrote about how social media might help scientists do their work, so a paper in IJWBS on how those on the receiving end of medical science – patients and healthcare practitioners – might benefit from web 2.0 caught my eye.

IT consultant Maire Heikkinen of University of Tampere, Finland, has focused on how the internet might be used in rehabilitation courses for sufferers of long-term neurological diseases including Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

Today, more than 2,500,000 people have MS, a disorder that affects different areas of the central nervous system and so leads to a wide range of symptoms from blurred vision and numbness to weak limbs, unsteadiness, and fatigue. Periods of relapse and remission are often characteristics of the disease but for other people the disease progressively worsens. Either way, it can limit everyday life seriously and makes for an uncertain future for sufferers and those close to them. “There is no known medical cure,” Heikkinen told Sciencebase, but medicine can help moderate the symptoms and prevent relapses, and rehabilitation can help people considerably.”

Getting hold of useful information about one’s disease, discussing problems, and following rehabilitation schemes, is Heikkinen explains an essential part of the process of healing.The rehabilitation for MS patients has traditionally been face-to-face courses and personal physiotherapy, but the internet has enabled some forms of online rehabilitation.

She has looked at the concept of a virtual community for rehabilitation and, in particular, the opportunities for sociability among participants. She found that peer support and the swapping of experiences were the most important part of the online activities. But, perhaps most intriguingly, the MS patients in her study seemed to have a higher trust level among themselves than is common in some online activities. The participants apparently preferred to get to know each other rather than operating anonymously as is common on other internet rehabilitation and support courses, those for cancer sufferers, she cites.

The internet course Heikkinen studied was “Power and Support from the Net”, which was organised by the Finnish MS Society. While there are those who claim that such virtual communities are somehow worth less than face-to-face contacts, others point out that circumstances and ill-health often prevent people from making direct social contact. It is the virtual nature of “online” that seems to offer a significant advantage in a virtual rehabilitation community, in that people are often more willing to discuss problems online than they would be in a face-to-face meeting.

There is evidence that being online is not the depressing default state that those railing against it would have us believe. Heikkinen’s study certainly suggests this is true with regard to outcomes for MS sufferers involved with PSN.

The internet was shown to be a suitable tool for arranging rehabilitation courses for MS sufferers, she says. The course team could build a virtual community at least for the duration of the course, but it will also be possible to continue the team after the course. The course may thus serve as an initiator for a longer-lasting virtual team that will exist for as long as the participants stay active.

Various researchers have outlined the benefits of online community in the past. Virtual communities are inherently social networks because at the base level they link together people, organisations and knowledge. They can become integrated into our daily lives and, as anyone with an active web 2.0 account knows, the internet can increase our contact with friends, relatives, and other contacts regardless of geography, time, or state of health. Fundamentally, adds Heikkinen, “When computer systems connect people and organisations, they form social networks.”

Maire Heikkinen (2009). Power and support from the net: usability and sociability on an internet-based rehabilitation course for people with multiple sclerosis Int. J. Web Based Communities, 5 (1), 83-104

Scientists Socializing Online

online-networking My post on social media for scientists seems to have been received rather well, with a huge amount of traffic and positive responses from various big name commentators across the networks and blogosphere.

Several scientists have already commented about the post over on Nature Networks. Nature’s own Maxine Clarke describe it as “an amazingly useful post” but was worried that there seem to be so many scientific social media clones now available. It is, she says, “It is hard to see them all enduring.” But, that’s not surprising, natural selection and survival of the fittest will kick in. Indeed, it already is happening to a degree. Some of these communities are fast approaching critical mass.

For instance, Joerg Heber is also concerned that there lots of clones and that although the trend is towards increasing fragmentation of our online identities, he points out that SciLink.com now has 44000 users or thereabouts, whereas SocialMD, claims just 3100. “In the end,” he says, “there surely will be a concentration process for all those sites and only a few will survive. There likely will be a self-accumulating user base for the most successful ones, as the more users there are the more sense they make.”

But, compare those figures with the likes of LinkedIn (30 million users) and Facebook (120 million) and one has to wonder what is the purpose of creating a niche community external to such sites, when one might simply create a group within those and have access to potentially millions of like-minded individuals. Indeed, it never occurred to me to create a standalone science writers community online, I simple organised a Facebook science writers group, which now has almost 400 members. Obviously, there are fewer science writers than scientists.

Heber concedes that LinkedIn and Facebook may not be perfectly suited to scientists, but wonders whether the networking sites I listed in the original post really are specific to scientists? “Can you share lab books and wikis?” he asks.

Martin Fenner mentioned ScienceOnline’09, which I do hope to attend (looking for a sponsor, right now). This unconference, which will be for scientists and science communicators alike will, he says, have a session on social networks for scientists, moderated by my good friends Cameron Neylon of Science in the Open and Deepak Singh of bbgm.

Fenner followed up his original comment with the following, pointing out that AAAS Science Careers (Social Networking Grows Up) also had an article on this topic [which I hadn’t seen when I started writing the original Sciencebase post mid-October, db]. “They talk about a few social networking sites for scientists, but somehow fail to mention Nature Network,” Fenner says, “The article also mentions social networking sites set up by universities, including ResearchConnect (University of Manchester) and Small Worlds (University of Leicester). I didn’t know about this (unless you count the Facebook organisation by universities), but it looks like a good idea.”

Brian Willson of the Microsoft Chemical Team Blog gave my post a mention and noted that most of the sites are apparently aimed at academia rather than industry. He was curious to know whether web 2.0 and online communities would impact scientists in industry, a topic he has discussed previously on the MCTB.

44000 members is impressive (for SciLink), but have any of the social media sites for scientists really achieved critical mass yet? By which I mean do they have enough active members to become self-sustaining and useful to science and the communities they serve?

Way back in the 1990s, I used to work for two of the biggest proto-social media sites for scientists – ChemWeb and BioMedNet. The former had more members than the American Chemical Society (which at the time was around 140,000 I believe) and BMN even more at, if memory serves correctly, close to half a million, far more than Facebook and LinkedIn put together!).

Both CW and BMN were incredibly innovative (having been created by Vitek Tracz, chairman of the Science Navigation Group, and founder of the open access publisher BioMedCentral as well as the those two online communities). CW and BMN were running what were essentially blogs alongside their news and features output, providing preprint servers (in the case of Chemweb), member search tools, webinars and online conferences, and access to dozens of resources. Of course, they were never labelled web 2.0. This was, after all well before the .com bubble burst and the web was reborn.

Unfortunately, both CW and BMN were bought up by a giant shareholder-driven publisher (mentioning no names) and driven into the ground once the company realised it wasn’t making enough money from them. Which was a great shame, because they really could have made huge inroads into the very world we are discussing. ChemWeb.com lives on thanks to Chemindustry.com and is thriving in its new form as my regular readers will know from The Alchemist newsletter, but at the moment it is not quite the community-led system it once was.

In some sense, all these new social media sites for scientists are simply reinventing a well-worn wheel from a decade past and whether or not any of them will achieve the significance (at their height) of a Chemweb or a BioMedNet remains to be seen. Offline scientific networks/societies continue to grow as they have done since their earliest days in the nineteenth century and before (their online efforts don’t seem to have yet built the online communities that could exist)

Given that many of the online efforts are insignificantly small in terms of membership numbers compared to the now defunct BMN and compared to the offline presence of the bigger scientific societies, I seriously doubt that more than one or two will survive and thrive. But, we’ll have to wait and see. Perhaps it will take a killer application for one to emerge as a leader and become as essential to scientists as MySpace is to a teenybopper and Facebook is to students. That killer application, however, remains to be revealed.

Sciencebase Siblings

UPDATED: ~~2011-01-26~~ 2018-07-16

The following sites associated with Sciencebase.com are now on a perpetual backburner: sciscoop.com, sciencetext.com, chemspy.com, and reactivereports.com. However,Â ScienceSpot.co.uk and ImagingStorm.co.uk remain active. The former as a repository/hub for research news from the journals the latter as a storehouse for my photography and music.

Sciencebase is active on social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etc. Usually available as username “sciencebase” or as David Bradley.

Scuppering the Program Pirates

program-code Professors the world over are worried about plagiarism: students simply lifting huge chunks from web pages and passing the thoughts and arguments off as their own. Then there are the Professors who steal from each other and publish their work in supposedly novel research papers and books and present it at conferences as original. This kind of plagiarism seems to be on the increase. No one knows the true extent to which it is being undertaken, but a few high-profile cases have increased awareness in the academic community of the paper pirates who could scupper your research career plans with a few well-stolen words.

It could be that a whole generation of students and unscrupulous Professors are creating an information black market. In the long-term, it is the students’ education, the research community, and the future of progress that will suffer. After, all student assessment is based on the assumption that their work is original and similarly the advancement of any particular area of endeavour relies on originality and credit where it is due otherwise the whole system collapses into nothing more than noise.

For instance, in the world of computer science, students programming submissions has an important effect on the whole computing educational procedure. “It is of a great importance to evaluate the programming skills of each student,” explain Ameera Jadalla and Ashraf Elnagar of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, “but the evaluation results become misleading and unreal due to the problem of plagiarism.”

The researchers point out that since the late 1970s, concerns about source code plagiarism have risen significantly. Various surveys have shown that up to 85 percent of a representative sample of students had engaged in some sort of academic dishonesty and almost 40 percent in one survey confessed to engaging in at least one instance of cut and paste plagiarism using the internet in the preceding year. Companies that offer to do the plagiarism for you, for a fee, are rife. Studies have shown that male students are commonly more dishonest than their female peers in this regard and science students more than health or educational students. Mature students are less likely to engage in such practices.

The researchers suggest that there are a few fundamental non-technical steps that can be taken to reduce plagiarism.

Increasing the number of in-class assignments.
Doing more group work, makes it harder to cheat if just one student is honest.
Explaining from an early age that plagiarism is unethical and that citation is important.
Expecting an oral presentation to show understanding.
Giving students different specifications for the same assignment
Improving coursework in terms of time, pressure and difficulty to preclude the need to plagiarise.
Having flexible deadlines if plagiarism is the other option to completion on time.
Using honestly policies and punishment systems.
Recognising different plagiarism techniques.

It is easy to see why some students might plagiarise the efforts of others: getting a better grade, laziness or poor time management, easy access to the internet and not understanding the rules. Students are encouraged to use the internet, but there is often no emphasis on the importance of citation or acknowledgement.

Indeed, say Jadalla and Elnagar, the focus of society on end results, the “ï¬nal certiï¬cate”, means that students are under immense pressure to perform while the opportunities for cheating have gone far beyond the simple sharing of notes among themselves and the copying out of textbook paragraphs that were well known in the previous generation. However, no amount of top tips for persuading students not to plagiarise will solve the problem.

There are various programs available that a hard-pressed Professor might employ to spot plagiarism in the work of their academic offspring, but this is usually tailored towards essays and papers. Now, Jadalla and Elnagar, have developed PDE4Java, a new Plagiarism Detection Engine based on the platform-independent system Java that can detect plagiarism in computer science code.

Plagiarism in software was defined as “a program which has been produced from another program with a small number of routine transformations.”

PDE4Java uses data mining techniques to spot content that has been copied from other sources in a given set of programs, usually without attribution. The system “tokenises” the suspect program and then uses data mining, akin to a search engine algorithm, to carry out fast similarity searching of the tokenised index. It can then display side-by-side views of similar programming code and so display clusters of code that look suspiciously similar. These clusters allow the instructors or graders to quickly spot programming routines that the students lifted from each other.

The researchers point out that although modern technology makes it easier for students to plagiarise the work of others, programs such as theirs are allowing Professors to catch up with the cheats and plagiarism sinners.

Search Engine Journal has a nice side-by-side comparison of currently available anti-plagiarism systems including Copyscape, DocCop, Plagiarism Detect, Reprint Writer’s Tool, Copyright Spot. Plagiarism Today also has an interesting post on how to find plagiarism.

Ameera Jadalla, Ashraf Elnagar (2008). PDE4Java: Plagiarism Detection Engine for Java source code: a clustering approach International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining, 3 (2) DOI: 10.1504/IJBIDM.2008.020514

Social Media for Scientists

NB This post is more than a decade old.

Towards the end of October 2008, I received a flurry of emails asking me to check out new social networking sites for scientists, I’ve already reviewed the nanoscience community, of course. I suspect that, the academic year having moved into full swing, there were a few scientists hoping to tap into the power of social media tools and the whole web-two-point-ohhhh thing.

This from Brian Krueger:

“I came across your blog during my weekly google search for “science social network.” I thought you might be interested in my website, LabSpaces.net. It’s a social network for the sciences that I’ve had on-line for the last two years and I recently got my University to send out a press release about it. I think you should stop by and check it out. Let me know what you think, I’m always looking for suggestions on how to improve the site.”

LabSpaces has all of the features of a social-networking site with the addition of a daily science newsfeed, lab profiles, a science forum, blogs, and a science protocol database. Apparently, the site provides space for researchers to create their own user profile, add their publication history, upload technical research protocols, blog about science, and share research articles with the community. The site will soon host a free video conferencing service to facilitate long distance collaborations and journal clubs.

New Zealander Peter Matthews who works in Japan emailed:

“I am a full-time researcher from NZ, working in Japan, at a museum with many international research visitors. This multilingual environment made me very aware of: (1) the difficulties that non-English based researchers face when using English, and (2) the difficulties that English mono-linguals face when trying to access or publish research in other important research languages, such as Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, French, and so on. Hence my website: The Research Cooperative – http://cooperative.ning.com. Please have a look, join if you want, and please tell any friends and colleagues about this site if you think they might find it useful.”

Pascal Boels, Managing Director of SurgyTec.com emailed with a medical tale:

“Our website is for and by medical professionals. It’s a video-sharing site for surgeons and medical professionals to show off their newly minted skills. It makes it easy for medical professionals to upload videos or slideshows and share those with the community. You can search for videos by specialty, organ/region, tissue, etiology, operation type, or technique. Many surgeons perform original and high-quality techniques in their operating room and equally many surgeons would like to learn from these new and inspiring techniques. Up till now it was very difficult, time consuming and expensive to take a look in each others operating room and share practical knowledge, tips and tricks. Surgytec.com provides the solution for this problem. We are currently serving over 4000 surgeons from more than 124 countries, sharing over 400 procedures

Priyan Weerappuli had long been interested in scientific research but felt that applied research was guarded by private institutions while basic research was held within the confines of colleges and universities by overpriced journals and an oversimplification that occurred whenever research results were translated for more general audiences. His forum/platform will attempt to open this research to a general audience – http://www.theopensourcescienceproject.com

Some correspondents are claiming they’re approaching web 3.0 nirvana:

“ResearchGATE is proud to announce a major update: We greatly improved our search functionality and called it ReFind. The name symbolizes the importance of an efficient and result-driven search functionality within research in general and within our network in particular. ReFind is one of the first search engines based on semantic, “intelligent” correlations. It enables you to find groups, papers, fellow researchers and everything else within and outside of ResearchGATE without having to read through dozens of irrelevant results. Just type a few sentences into ReFind or simply copy and paste your abstract. Our semantic algorithm will then search the leading databases for similar work, providing you with truly relevant results.” [Sounds like my Zemanta/ResearchBlogging.org idea, DB]

One observer pointed out, however, that ResearchGate’s semantic search is maybe not the greatest thing to happen to search in a decade (especially, when we have the likes of True Knowledge Ubiquity, and Zemanta. Indeed, some users have said it is not much of an improvement on conventional search.

Then there was:

“ScienceStage.com – Science in the 21st century – A wide forum for science – on an interdisciplinary, international and individual level. ScienceStage.com, the only universal online portal for science, advanced teaching and academic research, bridges a major gap in scientific research and learning. ScienceStage.com is a virtual conference room, lecture hall, laboratory, library and meeting venue all in one.”

But, perhaps the best is saved for last. An Oxford graduate student, who has completed his PhD, Richard Price, has launched Academia.edu, which he says does two things:

“It displays academics around the world in a ‘tree’ format, according to which institution/department they are affiliated with. And, it enables researchers to keep track of the latest developments in their
field – the latest people, papers, and talks.”

Price wants to see every academic in the world on his tree and already has Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Paul Krugman, and Noam Chomsky as members. But, that’s the hype what about its potential? It resembles BioMedExperts because both use a “social” publishing tree, but is that enough to engage scientists?

It will be interesting to see whether any of these sites gain the traction their creators hope for and how things will pan out as the credit crunch bites harder. “There are a bunch of them out there,” Krueger told me, “It’s kind of scary how many came out after Nature and I went on-line in 2006. There’s definitely a lot of competition out there, it seems like a new one appears every month. I wonder how the economy and loss of tech funding is going to affect the larger start-ups.”
Then, there are those perhaps more well-known social media sites and networks for scientists, some of which are mentioned in Sciencebase and its sibling sites (tomorrow), in no particular order:

Nature Network – uber network from the publishing giant (discontinued December 2013)
BioMedExperts – Scientific social networking
BioWizard – Blogged up Pubmed search
Mendeley – Digital paper repository and sharing
Labmeeting (blog) – Ditto
YourLabData – socialised LIMS
SciLink – Sci-Linkedin
Myexperiment.com – mostly workflows.
Laboratree.org similar to Researchgate. Not particularly social beyond groups and sharing documents with collaborators, but email is better, and arguably more secure.
scitizen.com – collaborative science news publishing
SocialMD – Med-Linkedin
Ozmosis – Ditto
DNA Network – network of DNA/genetics bloggers
ResearchCrossroads – Socialised grant databases
MyNetResearch – Socialised LIMS at a price
SciVee – YouTube for scientists (see also Watch with Sciencebase page
Scientist Solutions – science chat
Twitter science group and Scientwists list

There are so many, I can barely keep up, but if you have any you think I should add to the list, let me know via the comments box below. Or, more importantly, if you have used any of these systems please leave your thoughts.

Meanwhile, my apologies if you were expecting a lesson in how to use the likes of Twotter, FiendFreed, Ding, Pyuke, or Facebok’s feeble science apps, to help you get on in science socially, but I thought it was about time I did some linking out to the web 3.0 brigade in the world of science, so here they are.

Election Special

barack-obama Congratulations to Barack Obama and well done America, you should feel proud to voted for your 44th President in Barack Obama. But, now that’s done and dusted on with the real news:

In Issue 100 of the relaunched ChemWeb Alchemist, we report on energy is top of the agenda with a record-breaking solar cell material from Australia. New insights into the ripening of bananas reveals they get the blues while crystallography has been thrown a curveball as scientists discover the active sites in many models of protein receptors are not what they seemed to be. The chemistry of alternative medicine sits toxically under the glare of the Alchemist’s lamp and revelations about yet another small molecule with a crucial role to play in cellular control. Finally, a double ACS award for research on the structure and reactivity of molecular oxygen binding to copper and iron complexes, which could have future energy applications.

In SpectroscopyNOW this week, rather than designing and building new instrumentation from bespoke components, researchers in Canada have turned to the laser-based optical read-write technology of DVD and CD players to create a biomedical diagnostics system that requires no hardware modifications. Hua-Zhong “Hogan” Yu and his colleagues Yunchao Li, Lily M. L. Ou in the Department of Chemistry, at Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, are all for recycling. They have now developed a digital signal readout protocol for screening disc-based bioassays that uses a standard optical drive (CD/DVD) from an ordinary desktop computer.

blue-bananas Also, this week “Yes, we have blue bananas!” – Forget the so-called morning banana diet, blue is the new yellow and researchers in Europe and the US have no intention of slipping up when it comes to explaining why ripened bananas glow blue under ultraviolet light.

A gold star for SERS – Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, are using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to test the properties of star-shaped gold nanoparticles. They have found that these particles have optical qualities that outshine the competition and could make them useful in chemical and biological sensing and imaging.

Athletic support – Researchers have used NMR to show that endurance-trained athletes have a higher resting muscle metabolism than couch potatoes. The work suggests that the dissociation of oxidation and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production could be another route by which exercise improves insulin sensitivity and burns excess energy and may have implications for understanding the development of type 2 diabetes.

Crystals foxed – Obtaining a high-resolution crystal structure of a protein, a receptor or an enzyme, for instance, has been at the forefront of the drug design field for many years. Finding small molecules that will dock with the active site of the protein and either stimulate it or inhibit it is the basis on which many pharmaceutical products were built and are thought to work. But, what if that fundamental concept were wrong? This is the sobering and at the same time very important conclusion made by researchers at Leiden University in The Netherlands and the Scripps Institute, La Jolla, California

Science of Spam

spam ethics Who hasn’t received a spam email with some kind of clause laying claim to compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003? They usually say something about the message being anything but spam. But, it quickly becomes obvious, if you actually waste the time to read the content, that it is a generic marketing message for some kind of herbal remedy for enhancing one or other, or two, parts of your body, making you money, or offering an ugly gold-plated watch at a knock-down price.

Of course, the can-the-spam legislation was meant to squash spam forever, although by not making spam officially illegal across the globe, it did nothing of the sort. It was baloney, in a can. In fact, Petur Jonsson, the Professor of Economics and Chair of the Department of Finance, Economics, Entrepreneurship, and Marketing at Fayetteville State University, in North Carolina argues that while CAN-SPAM may have stemmed the tide of traditional marketing spam, it did nothing to protect net users from the subsequent tsunami of malicious spam. The surge of phishing spam, scam spam, and messages bearing malware has washed over many of us time and again left many users beached and hung out to dry, digitally speaking, in its wake.

In 2002, when the Act was first proposed there were some 30 billion e-mail messages being sent across the globe every day, almost half of which were “unsolicited and unwanted” spam. The legacy accounts of many email users, my first ISP email account and work account included, had no filtering or spam protection and were drowned in hundreds of spam messages every day. Some pundits argued at the time that spam would become such a huge problem that it would herald the demise of email. This was at a time when people still worried that if someone’s email signature, their .sig file, was too big it was wasting bandwidth. Oh, the irony…

“The Act banned a variety of deceptive practices,” Jonsson says, but unfortunately, “it also pre-empted the passage of stricter state laws that would have outlawed spam altogether.” Some of the states, led by California, were at the time preparing anti-spam laws that would essentially have outlawed all unsolicited bulk email. But, the CAN-SPAM Act nipped these state efforts in the bud.

Some commentators have described spam as “information pollution”; it is simply the waste product of an industry marketing its product. And, while this is a reasonable analogy when discussing benign spam, it no longer applies to much of the bulk email flooding the net today.

In the last few years, spammers have exploited technological loopholes for malicious ends. Thousands if not millions of computers have been recruited without their owners knowledge into zombie networks or botnets that propagate malicious spam. Open proxies are harvested and their systems used to reroute email rendering it essentially untraceable, while open relays allowing email header spoofing to confuse spam filtering systems on a massive scale as well as allowing slice after slice of spam to be sent at zero cost to the spammer.

The bottom line is that spam pays even if just one in ten thousand recipients is scammed, the spammers are then in profit when sending out millions of spam messages each day. Jonsson points out that the risk of being caught while phishing is smaller than the risk of getting caught peddling illegally imported bogus Viagra. This means phishing makes more sense. Spam is not just about annoyance it is about cybercrime on an enormous scale. The sooner the authorities recognize and respond to that fact the better for all of us.

Petur O. Jonsson (2009). The economics of spam and the context and aftermath of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry, 2 (1), 40-52

Melamine in baby formula, an open secret

melamine-eggs Thousands of babies had apparently taken ill having drunk formula milk to which the organic compound melamine had been added. The melamine was being added by unscrupulous operatives somewhere in the milk supply chain, to artificially boost the nitrogen content of the product, and so spoof higher protein levels than are actually present.

Subsequently, lists of contaminated products appeared in the media and on the web and as the melamine scandal widened, the Chinese government issued an apology and promised to crack down on the problem.

However, with news this week that batches of eggs imported into Hong Kong from China have tested positive for melamine, which is suspected of causing kidney problems, it now appears that the compound is being added routinely to animal feed in China. According to the BBC, this news has been released into the Chinese state media by a government realising it has far less control over food standards that it ought to have.

The melamine scandal is not new. It is essentially an open secret in China that the compound is added to all kinds of foods, particularly animal feed and pet food to artificially inflate the protein readings at the so-called quality control stage. Melamine was at the heart of the petfood scandal in 2007, but that was simply the first time that the West learned of the problem. It seems obvious that melamine could have been in the food chain much longer than that.

But, whether the open secret of melamine in the food supply is actually as serious a problem as the media would have us believe is down to toxic dose. AP quotes Peter Dingle, a toxicologist from Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, who says that aside from the tainted baby formula that killed at least four Chinese infants and left 54,000 children hospitalized in September, it is unlikely humans will get sick from melamine. The amount of the chemical in a few servings of bacon, for instance, would simply be too low, he said. But he is not recommending that the practice continue unchecked. China should have cracked down sooner on feed companies he and others have said.

However, if the melamine open secret is as big as it appears from the outside, it is unlikely to be stopped any time soon, particularly because of the heirarchical government system in China. “It could take five or even 10 years” before some companies stop adding the chemical to food products, Jason Yan of the US Grains Council is quoted by AP.