Narrative Control in the Digital Age

“Can’t the Internet control us just as easily as it can liberate us?” asked Jonathan Zittrain Wednesday night as part of the Provost’s 2010 lecture series. Zittrain is a law professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University,

Zittrain explained that technology is changing the way we access and add to human knowledge. Our ever-increasing reliance on digital information can create difficult problems with regard to the historical record.

One major issue is that people, governments, organizations or corporations can justify revising the record for various reasons:

• national security


• privacy


• copyright


• fairness (jury taint, defamation, group insult)

Zittrain offered a few examples where publicly-available information was deemed harmful, and how the problem was dealt with.

Apparently, the EPA used to make “worst-case scenarios” available on the Internet: detailed information about what would have to be done, where, to cause the most damage to life and property. The intent was to let people know that ‘Hey, something really bad could happen. Just FYI.’ However, in the wrong hands, this information could practically be a step-by-step guide.

In response to the uproar that inevitably followed when the scenarios gained publicity, the government decided to establish government reading rooms, where interested parties could go in sans cameras or writing materials of any kind and read as much as their heart desired. According to Zittrain, “It’s quaint. It was totally well-meaning, but there is an element of comicalness to it.”

Another pitfall to recording history in the digital age is that information is increasingly consolidated. Imagine a future where Ebooks are used exclusively over their ink-and-paper counterparts. If for any reason an Ebook vendor changes the book (perhaps due to copyright or governmental regulation), digital rights management would allow the change to be reflected in every copy.

“This is how holes appear in the historical record in way they did not before,” Zittrain said. “It is terrifying!”

Distortions in the record can be just as significant, especially when they can’t be distinguished from truth. For example, sponsored editorials that are favorable of a particular policy or person. As Zittrain put it, “[the record] doesn’t say later ‘By the way, this was fake.’”

“So what do we do? This is not necessarily making for a more complete or accurate historical record.”

His solution: Don’t keep everything in the same place. Lots of copies keep stuff safe! Libraries can play a role by keeping copies to check against other available copies & the Google master copy (when Ebooks eventually predominate, as Zittrain believes).

Furthermore, compromises can be made. For example, if China objects to certain content being shown on YouTube, that content can be restricted to visitors from China without necessitating complete removal (and thus preserving the record).

We must protect the historical record, Zittrain argues, because our view of the past depends on who wrote the story.

What Are Scientists Made Of?

Last Thursday, the Duke Career Center, the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & and Policy (IGSP) and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) sponsored a screening of the documentary “Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist,” the story of three PHD candidates working to establish their careers in a Columbia University lab. The students are working to isolate proteins and determine their structures using X-ray crystallography, a difficult technique that requires a lot of luck.

The documentary, filmed over the course of three years, captures the heartbreaking failure that can follow months of work, as well as the surprising triumph that can result from a breakthrough. Each of the three students has their own reason for being there, and each approach their research in a different way. (Click here to read a review)

At the beginning of the movie, lab director Larry Shapiro somewhat controversially says that “one of the best things you can do as a scientist is suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). You become obsessed with a problem and can’t stop working on it until you find your answer.”

However, Dr. Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, director of Duke’s Center for Science Education, argues that “you don’t have to be OCD or obsessed to love what you’re doing, you just have to have passion for it.”

Schwartz-Bloom was one of six panelists who shared their thoughts with the audience after the movie.

Grad student Vincent Chen was impressed with the film’s accuracy “in terms of the ups and downs in science. You have a lot of failures, and very few successes.”

Grad student Cynthia Tedore disagreed. “I didn’t see the repeated failure as accurate from my point of view. In any field, it’s bad to pursue one project with a small chance of succeeding. It’s better to pursue several.”

A member of the audience commented that, based on her experience in an X-ray crystallography lab, she thought the filmmakers did a good job. “I was touched by everything that happened. There are upsides and downsides. X-ray crystallography is very different from other fields, so [the movie] might not reflect what happens in other labs.”

Schwartz-Bloom said that the movie made her nervous with its emphasis on hard labor with a small chance of success. “A lot of kids today don’t go into science because they think it’s ‘too hard.’ Even people with some passion for it decide that they don’t want to do it.” She worried that the movie would only encourage this sentiment.

Fortunately, not everyone was so discouraged. My bio major friend told me that, despite the grim portrayal, she had not been dissuaded from her goal to be a scientist.

At the end of the discussion, the panelists offered their advice for aspiring researchers like my friend.

“Sometimes it is important to know when to quit, when a problem is impossible to solve. Otherwise, you can trash your entire career.” -- post-doc Rebekah Fleming

“Be a sponge. Take in everything you can, because you don’t know when you’ll need it in the future.” -- Schwartz-Bloom

“Don’t be afraid to find out what your weaknesses are, and how to fix them.” -- Tedore

“Science should be fun. If you’re doing it for your boyfriend or for your parents, you can do it for a while, but eventually it’ll break your heart.” -- panel moderator, professor Mohamed Noor of the Biology Department

Video Game Technology Attacks Cancer

Guest post from Cara Bonnett, Office of Information Technology

Kouros Owzar analyzes huge datasets to identify key genetic markers associated with cancer survival. For him, time is of the essence.

A new Duke computing resource that taps the power of graphics processors commonly used to render pixels in video games is going to enable Owzar and other researchers to complete complex statistical analyses as much as 75 times faster.

“Nobody wants to wait a month for an analysis to finish," said Owzar, assistant professor in biostatistics and bioinformatics. "You may run an analysis once, then want to run different scenarios, and if every one of those runs takes a long time, it’s not practical. This kind of tool allows us to tackle certain computationally intensive problems.”

Duke’s new computing cluster – part of a campus-wide network dubbed the Blue Devil Grid – harnesses the power of graphics processing units (GPUs), typically used in high-end gaming. GPUs deliver an order of magnitude difference in computational power compared with the central processing units (CPUs) found in desktop computers, said John Pormann, director of Duke’s Scalable Computing Support Center (SCSC).


Image: "Exponential Parameter Space Detail PSP Rays" byDr. L. Rempe, Wikimedia Commons

Because GPUs have dozens or hundreds of small “cores” or engines capable of doing lots of little things at once, they’re especially good for crunching away at what researchers call “embarrassingly parallel” problems, which are common in areas such as genetics, biostatistics and molecular dynamics.

"GPUs can split the job into smaller chunks, let the different cores just grind them out, and we collect the results at the end,” said Owzar, who, with his colleagues Ivo Shterev, Sin-Ho Jung and Stephen George, has developed a prototype comparing GPU and CPU processing speeds on different tests and data set sizes.

“Based on our experience, the larger the sample size and the more complicated the test statistic, the larger the benefit is in terms of speed.”

An analysis of data on 600 patients, for example – which would have taken about four days on a traditional CPU – now takes four hours. The prototype will be made available soon through http://code.google.com/p/permgpu/ as a stand-alone application and as an extension package for the R statistical environment.

GPUs also are much less expensive than high-performance computer clusters: One card costs $500 to $1,200.

The 16 machines in the Duke’s BDgrid include a mix of consumer-grade GPU cards as well as cards designed specifically for high-performance computing.

To find out more about BDgrid, visit the SCSC wiki or contact Tom Milledge in the SCSC.

Clean Technology- The future of energy

"Environmental innovation is a good business strategy in the current scenario," said Kirk Hourdajian,Project Manager at the Environment Defense Fund, at the Duke Conference on Sustainable Business and Social Impact held at the Fuqua School of Business on the 17th of February.

This conference aimed at promoting social and environmental sustainability in all industry sectors, and explored the most relevant questions on sustainability with the people on the frontlines of social innovation and business. The conference featured executives, scientists and researchers from organizations like IDEO, GreenTeamUSA, Mars Inc., Ogilvy, groSolar and Deloitte, among others.

In the session 'CleanTech: Make It, Fund It', Blake Clifton, Principal of Abundant Power, Scott Starr, Founder of groSolar and Kirk Hourdajian discussed the current state of clean technology, and talked about how the leading industry organizations and non-profits are driving market forces by driving clean technology.

"A 200 square mile area in the deserts of Arizona would be able to supply the entire electricity requirement of the United States for one year," said Starr, referring to the huge potential of solar energy.

Clifton highlighted the importance of government investments in nurturing the pet sustainability projects from conceptualization to completion. "The government involvement has to be huge. If the government doesn't give a 30% grant, then one cannot develop that technology. Infrastructure needs to be there to meet energy."

Other sessions included discussions about designing and engineering social impact, green as the new color of marketing, sustainable investments and strategies for climate change in the new world.

The Duke Conference of Sustainable Business and Social Impact was organized by the Duke MBA Net Impact Gold Chapter.